


Valse pour toi

by sigo



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: 1830s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Armitage Hux is Not Nice, Blood, Blood and Injury, Doctor Armitage Hux, Doctor/Patient, Evil Plans, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Forbidden Love, Gothic, Homoeroticism, Homosexuality, Horror, Idiots in Love, Kamouraska, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, Love Triangles, Love at First Sight, M/M, Marriage of Convenience, Mental Instability, Miscarriage, Murder, Narrator Armitage Hux, Non-Chronological, Patient Kylo Ren, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Sexism, Porn With Plot, Possessive Kylo Ren, Power Dynamics, Psychological Horror, Rape/Non-con Elements, Romance, Swords, Unreliable Narrator, Victorian Attitudes, Winter, actual swords as well, it is an innuendo and not, just the one actually, pregnancy mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:28:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 40,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27264268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigo/pseuds/sigo
Summary: In the 1830s in Quebec, Docteur Armitage Hux relocates himself from the bustling city to a sprawling estate in the rural north of Kamouraska, in order to take on a new psychiatry patient. Volatile and obsessive Ben Solo will change the path of Hux's life forever. This is the terrifying tableau of the life of Docteur Hux: his marriage to the Lady of Kamouraska; her violent murder; and Hux's destructive commitment to a forbidden love.//Kamouraska, but make it kylux.
Relationships: Armitage Hux & Phasma, Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Rey, Armitage Hux/Rose Tico, Finn/Rose Tico
Comments: 18
Kudos: 144





	1. TWO IN THE MORNING

**Author's Note:**

> [Valse pour toi playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3W7kuVgC4mL0qkuruslwqa?si=pGLMez78QKStAYHqULmeaw)   
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *cracks knuckles for a long obnoxious note*  
> TRIGGER WARNINGS will be in the end notes of individual chapters. If you see an 'end notes' link at the top that's a trigger warning down there, which I am utilizing for rape content. When it comes to other trigger warnings for this, heed the tags. I will say upfront that Hux and Ben are not nice people. They are also gay. This is me queering villains because I am queer and like villains. There's a lot of religion and 'sinning', if that bothers you. It's 1830-40. A bleak, cruel 1840. For the sake of character interaction, our POC characters are on the same social standing as our white characters -- Rose is in the same high class as Hux and Ben, Finn is a tutor (as in governess, a live-in teacher for children), and Poe is in the same house-servant class as Phasma and Kaydel.
> 
> This is 'Kamouraska' but translated into Star Wars. Some major plot elements have changed but it follows the basic beats of the novel. 'Kamouraska' is based on a true story. In the early nineteenth century in Canada, Elisabeth d’Aulnières married Antoine Tassy (Tache), but she fell in love with another man and murdered Tassy. The book, a fictionalized recounting of the actual murder, was banned when it was published (1970) for its dark themes. Each character enacts cruelty on the others in nuanced ways, some obvious and some subdued. It's a difficult read (especially if French is not your langue maternelle), partially because of the haunting abuse and partially because of the flowery prose and the way the tenses change from paragraph to paragraph.
> 
> Yes, the tenses are changing! Yes, it's on purpose. I toned it down and very rarely dropped into first person, but be prepared lol. The white house in my little photo set is the Tache estate in Kamouraska, the other photo is the frozen-over river with Kamouraska in the background. I did use some French but it shouldn't affect comprehension given context clues.

The summer passed en entier -- from beginning to end. Breaking his usual habit, Docteur Hux did not leave his home on Rue du Parloir. The season was stifling in the city, hot and full of rolling storms that had not departed with the spring, but neither Hux nor the children went to the country that summer. They could not have done so in good conscience without their mother.

Hux’s wife was going to die this day or the next, and deep calm invaded him, lighting up the dark corners of his mind as though someone had thrown open the windows to freshen him up. Rose was slipping away, their bedsheets stained dark with what would have been their fourth baby, the little girl she had wanted. It was an ungentle death. Hux waited nearby, dutiful and above reproach. His specialization was psychiatry, though he had once been in general medical practice. He called in doctors cleverer than himself to aid his fading wife and waited at their beck and call to assist them. His face was pale and vacant. Numb -- a suitable approximation of grief. He did feel a pang in his heart every time the sun dipped low, but only because this waiting had assumed distressing proportions, stretching out into the horizon like the merciless gray serpent’s tail of the Rivière-du-Loup.

Hux tried to tamp down on the peaceful feeling of finally being free that surged through him in waves, from his heart all the way down to his toes and fingertips. It couldn’t bode well. He was a man whose soul was stained by evil, and he deserved no peace. Should his tentative hope offend God too greatly, another punishment would come. A punishment even before the lake of fire he knew awaited him. Hux protected himself with grief, clutching to it and hanging from it like a nearby railing during a swoon. Grief not for his wife but for himself, for the time lost. There was a possibility for happiness still, somewhere beyond the death of the woman who had been his lawful spouse the last six years.

_ I should have left Québec before now _ , he thought.  _ Years or months, it doesn’t matter which, but before this dreadful waiting. I should have fled the barren and empty juillet _ . There was no one friendly to him left in town. When he went out to his office or made house calls, people stared at him, wary. They turned and stared. The moving crowd around him split in two and let him pass between like Moïse et la mer. No, not like Moïse. Like he was a strange beast walking among them, the mark of the devil on his face. It was a miserable world. Hux knew that better than most. Hux had stood up and faced it head on, with two policiers at his side.

Armitage Hux, widower of Rey Skywalker. He had felt like laughing at the many solemn faces turned up at him. What a ride, from Lavaltrie to Montréal. The warrant had been issued for his arrest and two policiers came, stinking of beer. One of them landed a punch right in Hux’s gut, doubling him over, though he’d done nothing to resist them once hope of escape was lost. The streets of Montréal scraped by under the sleigh runners, and then the heavy black door closed behind him and Hux languished between four moldy walls, smelling the toilet and shivering in the cold.

The indictment. Court of King’s Bench, session of septembre 1840. The Queen against Armitage Brendol Hux. Interrogations, witnesses, recounts of Hux’s youth and of his father’s exploits across the blue Atlantic. With each round he was made to dance, to spruce up his innocence like fluffing pillows on a couch, to convince a dark wood room full of staring faces that Hux maintained a sort of strange virginity. That his tongue had not slicked that white winter with blood.

He was locked up two months, and then sent home for reasons of health. The frigid cell and lack of a coat had sickened him, and he was already thin and pale as a slip of paper. Goodbye prison and goodbye dear warden, who had bestowed dark parting presents on Hux’s frame, bruises to remember him by. The warden still had Phasma to console him. Justice would hold her far longer: two years, and what a pity. But time wipes the slate, and now Delphine Phasma was as free as Hux. Free to start a new life. Hux’s lover...and oh, if the courts had known that for a  _ certainty _ , things might have been worse, but no, mercifully it had not come to light...his lover would never be extradited to face the court just as Hux had, or to feel a worse punishment come down on his head...around his throat, the hangman’s rope. The charges were withdrawn.

Hux married again. His wife wore a different veil and carried a bouquet of orange blossoms instead of river violets. A new wife, and honor was restored. Armitage Hux, husband of Rose Tico. Honor: it was the ideal to strive for when all love was lost. Hux walked through the streets with his honor a few paces ahead, never out of sight, dangling on a string for him to grab at. He dreamed of escape, of lifting his proverbial mourning veil. Of running away from Rue du Parloir and finding his love at the end of the earth. In Bourbonnais, in the United States.

_ In a while you’ll leave Canada, won’t you? _ Letters arriving, the words an impatient scrawl.  _ As soon as you can. That’s all I ask. I ache for you _ . Horrifyingly risky, to pen things like that. Hux burned the letters as soon as he read them, though he longed to keep them in a box beneath his bed and reread them, and hold them over his heart like a besotted twit.

Letters from Ben, though he signed a different name now. How the poor thing had suffered, all alone that winter, cold and alone on the road to Kamouraska. Four hundred miles there and back. Words that Hux didn’t write to him...  _ Love, you’ve hurt me so. Why pity you? You ran like a coward and left me behind to face the horde, the judges with their glassy dead eyes. My love, my love, if I see that lovely face again I’ll bite you. Let me bite you, beat you, kill you. It would not be punishment enough for your crimes against me. _

_ Time bears down on us, age coming to get us. It hasn’t touched me yet. I’d almost swear I look younger. I’ve been through hell but I’m still in one piece, and that piece still looks like it did when you wanted it bad enough to condemn us both. I feel as though my body must have become lovelier with the dreadful tarnishing of my soul. My ass is still firm. Sometimes I dream I can feel your hands on it, on me, clawing at me in the way you did. Holding tight enough to hurt. _

_ I’m standing tall again, acting the part of a respectable man. A wife, then two wives. And you, the love that left me in février, left me in the night in Sorel and then came back from Kamouraska. I’d never come so close to being happy in all my cursed life. And you ran away. You ran away, darling boy, with blood dripping from your hands. To Bourbonnais. I hear that name ringing like a shrill bell in my ears, taunting me. It hasn’t been hard to lead a virtuous life these last six years. Husband of Madame Rose Tico, a decisive little woman. Beautiful and kind, but decisive foremost, who insists on her rights as my wife before sleep. Every night, and until she’s satisfied. And me, the dutiful husband, I give it to her. Period or not, pregnant or not, nursing or not. She’s insatiable. It reminds me of you. I’m not pretending martyrdom. I get pleasure from it too, and the shame that comes with that pleasure. Even after your betrayal I feel as though I’m stealing my own pleasure from you by finding it in another. _

_ Why mince words, why pretend? I’m a source of income and status -- status tarnished by evil deeds but a successful city ‘docteur’ nonetheless -- and a producer of seed to make children, all of which my new wife wanted. And I needed rehabilitation, to avoid returning to my cell. Three children by me, slender and dark-haired with lovely bright eyes black as coffee. Oh how the idea of even one of my offspring growing in a woman’s belly used to make you froth at the mouth with vengeful jealousy. My beloved devil, is this your doing? How this fourth has poisoned her? Some dark magic, like you spoke of that night. _

_ I’ll be free soon, a widower again. Wiping my eyes at the service, my dry eyes. I’ll hand the children off to an orphanage together. They’ve never known tenderness from me to miss it. I’ll leave this city, exchange it for another, vast and unknown. Leave to find the only tenderness I’ve ever known. Lost love. This squalling brood of mine, the death of me and my reason for living, and this dull, blind land. I’ll leave it all. Cast it off like a weight. _

_ Does it weigh on you? The unholy sacrifice you offered up there in the snow, in the cove at Kamouraska, frozen over smooth as a dry field. My murderous love, treacherous love. Deadly love. It’s the only living thing in this world, the madness of love. ‘Please tell me how you are,’ you write, but words cannot say. I drown in my own mind every day and wake the next to drown again, and you’ve done this to me. _

_ I’ve never hated anything like you. I’ve never loved anyone but you _ .

He left it all unwritten and unsent, giving no answer to Ben’s desperate pleas for contact. Soon Hux would be free.

  
  


Armitage Hux stood erect, hardly breathing, hands on his hips as he bent toward the shutters and peered out through the slats. The street below exhaled warm, wet breath onto his face. Rain slicked the cobblestones, making them shine in the guttering light of the street lamps. Along the eaves, the gutter clattered, overflowing. In the bedroom thick with warm golden velvet, filled with furniture imported from England, a woman’s voice rasped inaudibly in the throes of fever.

In the distance: the sound of a horse’s heavy gait and the rolling of wheels behind it like thunder. It’s two in the morning -- what is a wagon doing out at this hour? In the empty, deserted night. It came closer, Rue Saint-Louis...Rue des Jardins…. It was turning the corner, closer and closer on it’s iron-rimmed wheels drawn forth by the clop of hooves.

_ It’s me they’re after _ , Hux thought wildly.  _ It’s me, I’m sure, six years and three brats not enough to wipe my image clean after all. Perhaps they think it’s my doing, though miscarriage is natural enough, and partial miscarriage not uncommon. They think I’ve killed her too, and I suppose I have. It was what she wanted, but patients beg me to shoot poisons into their bodies every day and if I should do it, it would still be malpractice. I pushed my body inside hers and started a tumor growing there and now it’s killing her and they’re coming to take me away _ .

In a carriage, but that wasn’t right. It had been a sleigh. Hux could still hear the runners behind him scraping on ice and hardened snow. The law hot in pursuit, Phasma riding with him, spurring their horse onward. The American border ahead, and with it safety. And love, somewhere beyond that invisible line in the darkness. The border in the middle of the forest and freedom behind it, freedom unreached. The visit to Montréal had been no use, talking to lawyers a mistake. Wasted time. Poor Phasma, clasping his shoulders and speaking in a furious rush, “I’ll do anything you say, Armie. We’ll both be damned together. I told you to be careful, didn’t I? But it’s his fault too, that monster’s fault, Ben Solo. It’s a sin, a terrible sin, you could hang for it….”

They only got as far as Lavaltrie.

Hux closed the window and turned toward his wife, dwarfed by blankets in their bed, her every thought of impending death.

“Haven’t you called to have the gutter fixed?” Rose croaked. “I can’t sleep with all that racket.”

“Do you hear that wagon?”

“What wagon?”

“In the street. The wheels are creaking.”

Rose struggled to lift her head, listening. The rain, the wind, the torrents of water gushing from the gutter clacking against the eave. “You must be dreaming, dear. It’s only the rain,” she said, even in her exhaustion softening her voice to lend him comfort. Poor, sweet woman. Hux was beyond feeling guilt.

He looked around the room, taking in the little table by the bed with it’s clutter of sick-things. Cups and bottles of medicines. A newspaper. A Bible. His eyes moved over to the face of his wife, gone green with nausea and infection, her eyes watching him in return. Hux straightened his jacket and walked over to the full-length mirror, smoothing back his hair. His mildewed soul was held prisoner yet, somewhere far away, but his body was here. Hair still red and vibrant, not a hint of silvery gray yet fading it. Face mostly unchanged, though the corners of his eyes had gained the faintest lines. He was still pretty, the way Ben wanted him. Through all the horror of his days, secret love cleansed him and kept him new.

Hux caught Rose’s visage in the mirror behind him before she saw him looking at her, her alert almond eyes burning with something very much like hate. She lay vulnerable in the long, tortured nights as her body fought for life, and her husband loomed like a triumphant figure. An image of death itself in his black jacket. Not mourning clothes, not yet, but horridly close. Skinny and pale in his black jacket and vest, and healthy. Healthy while she ailed. Rose asked for a lump of sugar so she could take her morphine drops.

“Not yet. It’s not time,” Hux told her firmly. Rose asked plaintively for Kaydel, the live-in maid. As though her husband weren’t more qualified to dispense medicine or medical advice. Hux’s face twitched. Rose’s lower lip trembled like a child about to cry. For the first time in their marriage, she looked afraid. She called weakly for Kaydel, her voice hardly penetrating through the thick wood of the door, shut. “It’s half past two in the morning,” Hux snapped at her. “She’s asleep. The children are asleep. You’ll wake them all and bring a circus in here.”

The whole world was out of reach, only this one man available to a dying woman. Madame Tico was all alone, offered up to her husband’s malevolence, a husband who had already once before…. Rose begged him again to go and get Kaydel.

“Don’t be absurd. The girl has to be up at six. I’ll get the sugar myself, I know where it is in my own house. Your husband isn’t so useless, see? There’s nothing to worry about. It’s not time for your medicine yet.”

Rose looked at the clock. Four more hours until Kaydel would appear in the bedroom doorway, her brown eyes sympathetic, her movements efficient, a kind smile on her face. ‘Did Madame sleep well? Here, let me freshen you up a little. Let’s go to the toilette, put your hands on my shoulder….’ With Kaydel it was alright to be sick, to be weak and disgusting, to be frightened. To complain or demand. But with Hux….

“Would you like something to drink, dear?”

Rose shook her head. She seldom took a single swallow of anything while Hux was even in the room, and demanded her pain drops from someone else. On the few occasions there was no one else and Hux gave them to her, she watched them fall on the sugar cube with rapt attention, seeing the color change slowly while Hux squeezed them out one by one. Their marriage had begun amicably enough, but as the shadow of death approached Rose had begun to fear him. She wanted badly to live. It was all Hux could do not to shake her, to say ‘ _ Yes, it’s true I want you dead, but I haven’t got to slip something in your drops to make it happen, have I? It’s done already.’ _

What an admirable man Armitage Hux was. The whole time of his wife’s illness, he hardly ever left the house. Always by her side. What devotion, what attention. A saint, Monsieur Hux, that’s what he is. An admirable husband. An honorable man.

“Please, go get Kaydel.”

Hux knew better than to go on telling a patient no when they won’t hear it. Interest them in something else, like a child. “Would you like me to read to you?” He poked along the books on the dresser, lifting them up one by one.

“That one, where the bookmark is.  _ Poésies liturgiques _ .” Rose watched her husband’s expression.

Hux opened the book, seating himself by the bed and finding the page with its pressed-flower bookmark. “Day of wrath.” A passage underlined faintly in pencil. “Whatsoever is hidden shall be manifest, and naught shall remain unavenged.”

Hux pretended he didn’t see through Rose’s game in selecting this particular tome. He was nothing if not a skilled orator, and he lost himself in the words. Spoke them all without faltering, without tripping over what was hidden inside of him, in his heart. Rose never believed he was innocent. He mused over that as he read. In her strength perhaps her husband’s monstrosity had not frightened her, but she was terrified now. Calling down everlasting vengeance on her husband’s head, and hiding behind the words of the Holy Book to do it. Rose watched him eagerly, no doubt waiting to see if her barbs pricked him.

_ I’m your husband. Your devoted husband. And you, suspicious of me after these six years of comfort? You? Always so kind, kinder than a man like me could expect… No, I won’t give myself away. There’s much you’ll never know. You have no hold on me. You’re a stranger, Rose, a beautiful stranger. That’s what husband and wife should be: strangers smiling as they pass on the street _ .

“Why are you smiling?”

“Nerves, dear. It’s nearly three. Your husband is tired.”

“I asked you to go and get Kaydel. Then you can sleep to your heart’s content.”

“I’ll get the sugar,” Hux sighed, setting the book aside and standing wearily. Rose’s face was growing shiny with sweat as the pain wracked her. The doctor’s orders must be followed to the letter: five drops on a lump of sugar every four hours. In exactly nineteen minutes it would be time for another dose.

Hux hurried downstairs, acting quickly to keep another tragedy from descending on his house. There were moments in his life that arrived like a flash of light across a dark sky, revealing deep, sharp anguish. Quick, quickly now! Ward off the danger. He would stop at nothing to keep the order from being shaken again. Fail for a second in his duties now and madness would rise, reborn from its ashes, and he once again the victim. Bound hand and foot, iron leaving raw wounds on his thin wrists and ankles, hair unkempt and face unshaven, shivering in the gloom beneath the city.

The carpet rods on the stairs flashed by, bright copper against dark wine-red. He looked everywhere, rummaging behind the empty sugar bowl on the bottom shelf for an extra bag. He checked the saltcellars and even the mustard pot. Nothing, but the sugar must be there. Somewhere. An endless supply replenished by hands whose duty it is to keep providing sugar. That’s how it worked. That’s how it had always worked, and how it still worked with the salt, the oil, the eggs, the flour… all here, all provided without fail. Perfect order. Damn Kaydel -- Hux will have her head if she forgot this most important thing, the blasted sugar. If she’s moved it Hux will give her a lashing with his belt, just like his father used to do with him and propriety be damned, or  _ worse _ , God forbid if she’s let it  _ run out _ ….

Five drops on one lump of sugar every four hours.  _ I’m partly to blame _ . Hux was a proud man, but not too proud to admit his own failures. How could he let the sugar disappear like that?  _ My God, it must have been the children _ . He had the urge then to wake them up himself, to call them down from their slumber in that top-floor room of theirs with its blue vaulted ceiling and line them up like undersized dormitory trouble-makers and scream himself hoarse. They’d cry, of course, and it would make no difference to anything, of course. They’d be a shield of sorts, too. Wake them and take them to their mother. Rose would look on them with kind eyes even if she had to take her drops unsweetened, like acid. All her sweet little dears, the two oldest -- twins, an ill omen if Hux had ever seen one after his last experience with a goddamned pair of  _ twins _ \-- just started schooling last fall, and the baby pissing and slobbering in cashmere and lace. Three little imps, little boys, holy terrors.

He’d wake them up and balance the baby on one slim hip and nevermind if it started squalling, he’d put the twins against the wall and say sweet as syrup, ‘Have we ever run out of sugar before? Have we? Answer me, the both of you. Who could contradict your testimony? You may speak your piece and go right back to bed. Your father never loves you so much as when you’re lying fast asleep above the rest of the house and out from under his feet.’

Instead, he rang for Kaydel. He wouldn’t drag the children into the mess, better to keep them safe in bed, safe from  _ him _ , but he’d give Kaydel a right talking-to for her carelessness. The peal of the bell ripped through the night-silence of the house, echoing. Hux stood, still holding the cord, feeling the vibrations rippling through his pale hand in little waves, diminishing with time. He let go of the cord when it was still, as though making sure that another deafening clamor would not ring out and wake all of Québec. Kaydel didn’t come running, perhaps one ring of the damned bell wasn’t enough, wasn’t the shrieking violence of cannonfire it had seemed to Hux. He was about to pull again, when -- there!

Next to the breadbasket, the sugar in an opened bag. He dumped it into the sugar bowl and tucked a few lumps into his pockets. Picked up his lamp, still burning. He rushed up the stairs, out of breath, and stood before his wife. Heaven be praised, she was still alive. She could not die under Hux’s watch, not his alone, and not with a missed dose of her pain medication. He smiled down at her in relief. She smiled up at him dimly, fear receding and that old comfortable warmth returning. It made Hux’s chest feel funny. Was it possible that he had ever loved her? No, impossible. He was so full up of one love as to leave room for no other. But had she loved him? It was possible. Not the sort of love Hux knew, the sort that wrenched you apart and put you back together and left you screaming alone in the bloodbath. A different sort. A smaller, safer sort of love.

He counted the drops, his hand trembling. Rose’s soft smile didn’t falter, even though her eyes were clouded with pain.

“Please, dear, calm yourself,” she soothed. She was dying, gone feverish and green with the corpse of their daughter stuck and rotting in her womb, and here she was comforting Hux as his hands shook.

“Count them with me,” Hux said, drawing close to Rose’s side. Let her share in the culpability. He would join her in her distrust of him, allow her loathsome supervision after six years of honorable work to provide for her and her house. Rose counted them, falling one by one round as tears. She swallowed down the sugar, crushing it in her mouth along with the drops, and closed her eyes in gratitude and fatigue. Hux got down on his knees and kissed her forehead, feeling the damp and feverish skin under his lips. He put his forehead to hers after, something he’d done all the years of their marriage. He knew she liked it.

Docteur Hux and Madame Tico joined again like the fingers on one hand by the relief of medicine asked for and given. Wholly united as one being, reduced to the simplicity of that. One single mind guiding their path; usually Rose’s. One single life, concentrated. Soon broken, soon fragmented again. Her hand came up to cup his face weakly and then she moved against him, trying to sit up. He helped her, looked at the incongruous concern on her face, concern for  _ him _ , and realized he was crying. He laughed, and it came out without mirth, a chilling sound.

“Armie,” Rose said. “The children….”

They had not yet spoken of the children. Her hopes of survival were dwindling, then. Hux felt out of his mind with fear and grief and hope and promised peace. Even though he had tried to resist, he’d let himself get carried away in dreaming. He let the dream grow wild like brambles until it overran his mind. He went on dreaming at risk to life and limb, dreaming that one day his life and its imagined double would be one and the same. No difference at all between them. Ben’s arms around him, Ben’s lips on his, the two of them free in the foreign place beyond the pines, the blood washed off at last. But there was danger in that dream. Let it consume him and he’d slip up. Doom would cling to his very bones and he’d be dragged back before the courts and declared guilty over again and locked away forever.

“I’m afraid,” Hux told her. It was the truth. “I’m so afraid.”

Rose looked at him with pity, even as fever ate her alive. Pity for her killer. He hadn’t meant to do it. He’d hoped, and that was bad enough. He hadn’t meant to kill her in this perfect, accidental way. He leaned forward and nuzzled his face next to hers, his cheek next to hers. This woman could only protect him so far. She was caught in his fear with him, caught in the trap. That’s what marriage was -- one fear shared between two, empty caresses in the dark to drive the fear out.


	2. DAWN

Dawn. That dim, uncertain moment between night and day. Awake all night, his body was close to handing his mind over entirely to nerves.  _ No, my darling Rose, you aren’t quite dead yet. Still, you can feel yourself going under, about to drown. Weary. You’re so tired. It washes over you, heavy and dense, rolling you over in the frigid tide. Throws you onto the sand, tasting salt and slime, shivering with pain so great it’s a marvel one body can hold it all _ .

And there by her bedside, her husband, and yet far away too. Lost in thought, green eyes boring a hole in the wall.  _ Better call him back, Madame, and make him return to this brink of life where you’re spinning out your final sickly days. Why be alone in agony? Unthinkable _ .

“Armie?”

Hux looked at his wife, and thought for her.  _ Oh, to be well enough to rape that man. No authority would call it rape, no court of man or God. Rape is perpetrated by men and happens to women, and he was eager enough, wasn’t he? Prick all red and leaking, nevermind that sometimes his eyes leaked too, what an unmanly display...never mind that a part of him died every night for six years, wondering whether the man with bloody hands would still want him after all these little betrayals, these necessary betrayals of love. Oh to be well enough to force him back into the marriage bed and lay him out. My deathbed. The two of us can share. Force him to think about me, suffer with me, share my agony, die with me. What a riddle he is, this husband of mine. This guilty man who went unpunished. Oh, to see him convicted of his sins before the end _ . He shook his head, clearing it of its ramblings, the hateful inventions of sleep deprivation. He was being uncharitable, he knew that.

“Yes, darling?” Hux asked.

“That woman...what was her name?”

Hux’s orange brows creased. “Woman? What are you talking about?” For all his worldly flaws, women could not be counted among them.

“You know. The one that used to smoke a pipe like you. Delia?”

Hux grew pale and a shudder racked him from head to toe. He turned it into movement, disguising it, crossing his legs and running a hand back over his hair, scowling. “Delphine. Why bring that up? What’s come over you?”

Silence, and then a scar forming over the silence. Rose Tico’s innocent little question slithered into Hux’s mind and the wound closed around it. Sewn up with careless needlework to heal ugly or fester. He wanted to box his wife upside her self-righteous head. A quick movement, a viper’s strike of the hand that would leave her reeling. She couldn’t do much to fight back. Bite, maybe. Hux picked up the pitcher on the nightstand instead, pouring Rose a glass of water.

He held it to her lips, but she took no more than a mouthful. Hux wanted to pour the rest on her. Watch her splutter and cough, wasting the dregs of her earthly energy. He set the glass aside on the table and leaned back in his chair, letting his head fall against the backrest and closing his eyes. His hair was coming loose from it’s styling, pieces falling forward. His eyes were ringed by purple shadows and his full lips overly pink. He’d been biting them. Awake the whole night just like Rose.

_ I’m mad but my mind is clear. Oh, if only you knew, Rose. If only you knew, dearest wife, how I share your fevered nights. Both of us together in the same delirium, yoked together. Dragging the waters of time, the net of memory dredging up small and worthless treasures. The first time I came into your bed, Rose, and you were so soft in your dressing gown, your skin dark against mine. The way you eyed me once I uncovered myself almost made me laugh. Do you remember? I think you saw me stifling it. My amusement at the way you studied me and found me lacking. The failure of our wedding night, my body betraying us both so that you had to content yourself with my fingers and tongue. My God, can it be that nothing inside us gets washed away until our very life drains out? It’s clear she never forgave me -- maybe for the evils of my life before her or maybe just for one night’s impotence -- dredging up that name from the stagnant water of the past. Delphine Phasma, like a rusty and waterlogged weapon to kill me with _ .

“Try to relax and get some sleep,” Hux instructed Rose. “Kaydel will be here soon.” Rose closed her eyes. What a good husband you have, Rose Tico. So attentive to the slightest sign of death on your face.

Hux left, frightened that his wife would die with no witness there to see it and declare him innocent, but more frightened of what he himself might do if he must look upon her face any longer after hearing Phasma’s name. He went to the guest room and bathed himself with a rag and bowl, cleaning his face and hands and feet meticulously and giving the rest a rougher scrubbing. Ran his hands through his hair to loosen it completely at last. He pulled warm underthings on and threw one of Rose’s winter shawls from the guest room closet about his shoulders. Why not take one last stand here and now, and stop caring for her? Isn’t that what Rose wanted? Leave it all between her and Kaydel and Death. Kaydel could take care of Rose until the end. Hux would just wash his hands of her. He needed to rest. He pulled the curtains and lay in the guest bed, diagonal on it. It had been a long time since he had a four-post bed to himself, and he stretched out.

The only time Kaydel came to life was around Rose. She liked her mistress very well, that much was obvious. She liked the house and children less, and Hux not at all. She was a good-for-nothing maid, far too laid-back and jovial for her frequent mistakes. She let the milk boil over on the fire with the morning porridge, and she broke glasses and plates, and put the children’s shoes on the wrong feet. Hux would have liked to send her home long ago, back to whatever hovel she crawled out of, only Rose had loved her and forbade it. Kaydel could just go and watch Rose die, then. Watch her gasp for her last breaths as the rot Hux put in her took her life. He heard Kaydel’s muffled step now, in those slippers she always wore, coming up the steps and going into the master bedroom.

Hux surrendered his wife to kinder hands. Thrown out. Out of the room they shared for six years, out of his own bed. Six years they had lain together in that big bed, the frame carved by hand and laden with a feather mattress and linen sheets. Now Hux lay alone in the guest room. The one used by the children’s teacher, Finn Harry, who was shuffled upstairs and slept on the couch there. Now that Rose was so sick….

That smell. Like ink. Finn’s bed still smelled like him, but Hux needed to fall asleep. Sleep, before the children woke up. He needed to learn to sleep by himself. It was amazing how quickly one gets used to sleeping beside another. Knowing someone is there with you, warm beneath the covers. An embrace to comfort you.

_ Today I admit it _ , Hux thought sleepily, _ without you, dear little Rose, I’d have died long ago. Eaten up by my own nightmares. Frightened to death and ripped to shreds. A storm of terror rages around me. There, in the snow, I see a man covered in blood and a woman beneath him. I see him there. Oh, Rose, I’m so afraid. Take me into your arms once more and help me find a little salvation _ .

Hux started, opening his eyes and looking at the ceiling. He thought about going back into the master bedroom for a pair of woolen socks. He was chilled suddenly, as though it really were winter outside and not a rainy summer’s day. But, no -- it would mean seeing Kaydel in his chair. Interrupting the strange bond between Kaydel and Rose that he was not privy to. He felt a prisoner in his own house, albeit a much more comfortable prisoner than he’d been in Montréal. He closed his eyes again.

  
  


Guilty! You’re guilty, Docteur Hux!

Hux jumped up and listened. Kaydel’s step was light in the next room, puttering about by his wife’s bed. Had she taken a turn for the worse? No, Kaydel would fetch him. He needed to sleep. Besides, it was all her fault, that dismal creature. His poor wife, in league with Kaydel, conspiring against him for his everlasting perdition.

_ My wife is dying again. Peacefully in her bed this time. The first time was nothing but violence. Blood and snow.  _ Not two wives, following each other in the registers. One woman, one and the same, at once slim and wider, softer. Hazel and brown-eyed. Carrying both river violets and orange blossoms. One long snake with opalescent white scales, always the same creature, coiling about herself in endless rings.  _ The eternal woman who takes me and lets me go _ . Over and over. The first face full of hope and anxiety. She wanted to be happy. She might have been promised to her cousin, were he sound of mind. As a substitute, his city doctor suffices. Ouais, ça suffit. She was only nineteen and she wanted to be happy, wedded at the family estate in Kamouraska while her cousin destroyed his room, locked inside. A plain fit of jealousy. But for whom?

Next in Hux’s recollection: love. Love in all its somber radiance. Moles, brows, lashes, hair -- all black. The sweet and burning port wine of black love, an elixir taken outside the bonds of marriage, outside the safe harbor of faith. His eyes were brown ringed with gold, gold like two wedding bands, binding Hux for life.  _ Love. I’m sick with it, Ben, and I’ll never see you again _ .

The third face in the triptych: Rose, kind and plucky and in Kaydel’s hands. All Hux wanted to do was sleep. Was Kaydel moving the furniture? What was that awful racket? Kaydel was busy arranging the rooms of course, arranging them for the trial. She was throwing the carriage gate open wide and the front door too, and standing there to hail the crowd. Shouting terrible things at the people going to mass at seven.

_ Oyez, good people, oyez! Madame is dying and it’s Monsieur that did her in! We’re going to put him on trial. We’re going to grill him like a rabbit sliced up the middle with his miserable guts hanging out. Oyez! The indictment writ in the Queen’s English! _

_ At her Majesty’s Court of King’s Bench, the jurors for our Lady the Queen upon their oath present that Armitage Brendol Hux, late of the parish of Kamouraska, in the county of Kamouraska, in the district of Québec, husband of one Rey Skywalker, in the bleak winter of the second year of the reign of our sovereign Lady Victoria, by the grace of God and the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, defender of the faith, with force and arms at the parish of Kamouraska, did willfully, maliciously, and unlawfully, orchestrate the murder of his lawful wife, one Rey Skywalker, then and there being a subject of our said Lady the Queen, with intent in doing so feloniously, willfully and of his own malice, against the peace of our Lady the Queen, her crown, and human dignity. Oyez! _

Court is now in session.

  
  


A cry, sharp and guttural, piercing Hux’s skull. Kaydel was the devil -- he had taken the devil into his house. Hux took his head in his hands. Every cry was a blow.  _ I’m dying, I’m dying _ . He sat up. Sunlight poured into the room, Finn’s bedroom. It was midmorning. The dreadful noise was not Kaydel at all. Upstairs the children were raising a terrible racket, seeing who could squeal the loudest and stamp their little feet the hardest. Three wavering, piercing cries sounded above the rest, not in pain or anger or hunger. The baby was screaming just for the joy of making himself heard, squalling at the top of his lungs over his older brothers.

Hux pulled on his navy robe and dashed upstairs, the twins quieting as he came, already recognizing their dire mistake. Finn was hushing the baby, watching all three instead of just the twins. Kaydel had left him to it, concentrating on Madame over the infant. Hux arrived in the nursery, wild-eyed and breathless, and yanked the nearest child to him to deliver a healthy slap to its face. Little Brennan, so shocked he forgot to whimper. Renaud stared up from his blocks, frightened he was next. The baby, too, was quiet in Finn’s arms. Hux couldn’t remember the name Rose bestowed on it, he had lost track. The girl would have been Paige. Rose said that name so frequently Hux could never forget it. Finn looked at Hux with open reproach, but said nothing.

“What’s gotten into you, screaming like that?” Hux hissed. “With your mother so sick!”

“Papa’s face is red,” Renaud divulged to Finn, in a child’s loud whisper. The high-pitched voice dredging up another voice buried in the darkness of time, a long root torn thundering from black soil, still covered in earth. Poe Dameron testifying before the magistrate, Hux’s undoing.

‘The whole time Ben was gone from the brick house in Sorel, the good Docteur was all excited and red in the face. Redder than he usually is.’

Hux wrenched little Brennan’s arm until he cried out, pulling him up nearly into the air. Finn took a step forward and halted when Hux glared at him. Hux dropped his eldest son, letting him fall to the floor and scramble away to hide behind Finn’s legs.

“Take them to the park,” Hux said wearily. “I don’t care, just keep them out until nightfall. The doctors will be by. She could go any minute.”

That’s that. Amen.

Hux went and dressed himself, pulling on a shirt and trousers and vest, navy with a shining floral design. No jacket for now, and no shoes, so that he could pace the deathroom without waking Rose. Redressed and refurbished, clean-shaven and hair slicked back anew, Hux returned to his post by Rose’s bedside to be there waiting when God snatched away his prey. Hux dismissed Kaydel and waited there, giving Rose drinks of water and showing her a face full of peace. Projecting unity and harmony. Innocence.

Rose tossed in sleep and muttered Kaydel’s name, calling for her even now over her own husband. She didn’t see him. She passed him by in the death throes of her mind and called for the maid.

“Kaydel’s out shopping. She’ll be home soon.” Hux could feel his face heating again. It was too much. It was insulting, to go through such hell, and then to marry again and have his wife call for another. She was insulting him. When Kaydel came back Hux would send her to the kitchen.

Rose’s voice, soft: “Armie?”

“Here, love.”

“Did you want to marry me?”

Hux’s voice, flat and unwavering: “If not for you, I might have gone back to my cell. And if not for you, I might have been free.” Not a heated exchange. Two perfect thrusts with the dagger, straight to the heart of the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW:  
> Hux refers to loveless sex in marriage as rape. Sex between Rose & Hux in marriage has been 'consensual' in that Hux does it willingly, but he agonizes over it as a betrayal of Ben. He has never told Rose this -- she is unaware of his feelings about it.


	3. ELEVEN O' CLOCK

The morning dragged on, and Kaydel did not return. Rose was beside herself, asking after her. Hux did all he could to quiet his wife down. He ran back and forth between his seat and the window, watching the street below. Ran upstairs, downstairs, even stepped outside to the wood-plank sidewalk watching for her. Then back to Rose.

“It’s only eleven. She’s not late.”

Rose was teary-eyed. “But she should be back by now. She knows I’m waiting.”

Kaydel could be run over in the street by a speeding carriage, choking on her own blood and shit, and Hux wouldn’t give a damn except that he had to hear about the goddamned fool…. Kaydel appeared, coming down Rue Donacona loaded down with vegetables and fruit. Hux met her at the door, taking one of the sacks and poking through it on their way to the kitchen.

“Green peas AND raspberries!” Kaydel announced with a smile. Her smiles brightened her face and made her almost lovely, even with the way she did her hair, the two buns that reminded Hux chillingly of Kamouraska. She washed two raspberries beneath the hand-pump tap and handed one to Hux to sample. It was sweet and tart and good to bite into. He shelved his irritation with Kaydel, letting peace wash over him again standing in his sunlit kitchen with her.

 _How lucky you are to work here. My father forced himself on the maids. It’s how I was born. Are you grateful for a nice city house to work in without that danger? Without being menaced even once?_ Hux knew she wasn’t. Kaydel disliked him on principle. Hux hadn’t needed to raise a hand to her. She came into the house and looked between Hux and Rose, and decided that Hux was rubbish. She barely acknowledged him unless he demanded it, acting as though Rose were her employer. It had previously been irritating. He let her silence and turned-away eyes soothe him now.

But peace could not last forever: back up the stairs, open the window for a bit of fresh air now that the rain’s quit. Don’t fall asleep. She could go any minute. Be there, be attentive, the picture of the loving husband. Straighten Rose’s pillow, smooth out the sheet atop her body. Rose clasped her hands on top of it. Her fingernails were blue. No, Hux mustn’t fall asleep. He ordered a cup of black coffee from Kaydel when she mounted the stairs, sending her right back down to make it.

The doctors arrived, two of them, their voices dull and flat, preaching sermons they knew by heart. “Really, Monsieur, you’re asleep on your feet. Lie down. You haven’t slept for days, and you can’t go on this way. Go and lie down, we’ll call for you….” The doctors and Kaydel conspired to be rid of him. Hux resisted.

“I’m her husband.”

“Armie, get some sleep.” Rose, too, her fearful dying hatred strengthened by Hux’s admission. Her mind had not yet slipped, and she remembered. But the priest was on the way and Hux had to be here. Rose wanted to send him off to sleep and have him shirk his duties, to rob him of her dying breath. Hux was the only one who should be here with her, to hell with the maid and the doctors. The only one, for better or worse. It was what the rings on their fingers meant, the rings he could never have exchanged with Ben. His _wife_ , trying to send him away now, send him to rot in his cell.

That hysterical crying. Who is it? Hux would cane them for that racket, he’d…. The tears welled up and overflowed, sobs choking his throat.

The doctor’s dull, unflappable voice: “Monsieur, you have to get some sleep. You’re feverish. Here, take this with a little water. You can’t go on this way, believe me.”

Finn came in, sans children. _I hope you left them. I hope you left those fucking brats_. Hux didn’t know whether he thought it or said it. The doctors manhandled him into his chair and forced his mouth open and a pill down his throat, followed by room-temperature water from a pitcher needing refilled. Finn hoisted him up and helped him into his musty room, Finn’s room.

“Come on, sir. Lay down.”

  
  


The red linen drapes were pulled tight but the shutters were open behind, sunlight streaming in through the closed curtains. It cast a curious glow over the whole room and over the bed, red and bright like raspberry juice. Hux lifted his hands in the light, looking at them curiously. They were dry, but looked as though they were submerged in a pool of red water. His temples throbbed as if he wore an iron crown tight as a vise. Tight as a vice, his vices chaining him to the cold hard wall. His one vice, above all others. Ben.

_What did the doctor give me?_

Alone, all alone in the red room. No company but an aching head. Lock the door and keep everyone out. Just rest. Indulge in a mad fantasy of sound and vision and memory. Madame is dying and so is Monsieur, so is Docteur Hux. He cared for Madame so long he’s dead on his feet.

A rosary hung from the canopy of the bed, beads swaying. On the dresser, a Bible and a statue of the Virgin. She looked like Rey, though Rey had been no holy Virgin by the time Hux was done with her. By the time Ben rode through the snow. A rosary, a Bible, and Mother Mary the unsullied. Finn was well-protected against whatever evil _maladie_ Hux’s presence brought into his bed.

Hux’s eyes were heavy. He closed them and turned his face to the wall. Rays of red light played upon him, sparkling with the glint of hellfire. Why didn’t Finn close the shutters? All sorts of little creatures danced behind Hux’s eyelids. Rey Skywalker...her father and his twin, demon twins, Leia Organa. Our Lady of Kamouraska with her two buns. Phasma smoking her seasoned clay pipe, offering Hux a drag. Hux asked her to close the shutters, to block out the light, and she shrugged. Leia Organa was cleaning the room. No, she was taking things out of the dresser. Evidence for the court to see. Evidence to convict Hux anew.

Finn’s things transformed. Now on the dresser was a silver Virgin instead of a cheap one, and a new Bible bound in supple blue leather and with gold leaf on the page edges. The rosary dangling above Hux’s head sported a solid gold cross and beads made of gleaming black pearls.

Luke and Leia and Phasma darted about the room, rearranging furniture. They brought over an upright piano.

 _No, don’t bring that here. I won’t look at it_. The pages rustled on the stand. The name of a song in black print in the red room for all to see, damning Hux.

On the keys, his medical files for Ben. A journal, bound in black leather, Hux’s writing inside. Notes from conversations and details of sedative doses giving way to fresh blood. The patient outline of a plan, conceived like an ill-fated pregnancy between the two of them. They worked it out over the evenings in Sorel, plotting the murder by the light of the lamp, when they were meant to be working out Ben’s endless well of anger.

Ink on the page. Ink from the silver tip of the pen, dipped into the bottle, transferred to the page in quick, efficient scratches. The crime, crossing the threshold of Hux’s heart. His willing heart. Rey Skywalker’s death, hungered after like a delicious piece of fruit. A delicacy. His accomplice by his side, his handsome face close to Hux’s, obscured by the dark tangle of his hair.

 _I’m spellbound, Ben, my dearest boy. I’m fully under your spell. It oughtn’t be this way at all. Even if your places were switched, yours and hers, it’s a sin to take advantage of a patient. The both of us men, besides. Sin upon sin, layered like decadent champagne cake. You’re mine. My patient, my charge, my lover. From the very beginning you accepted nothing less. You saw and you wanted and you demanded me_.

Hux’s ear, attuned to the murmur of Ben’s blood beside him. Ben’s hands, large and broad and yet also refined, practiced on the ivory keys. At the slightest move Ben’s knee grazed Hux’s. On the surface everything was correct. Leia watched them sit together on the piano bench and saw nothing amiss. Luke laid out cards on the table in the corner, half joking, attempting in vain to read Hux’s future.

“The lovers. Have you received a love letter from the city since you came here, Docteur?”

“No, sir. The cards lie to you this night, I’m afraid.” Hux didn’t believe in the cards. The deck was fixed, like the human heart. This evening was peaceful and calm. Most evenings weren’t. Ben was on his best behavior. Therapy was working, or so Hux’s employers thought. Therapy paled in comparison to darker promises. _Behave yourself for your mother and when you come to me in the dark I’ll lift my nightshirt for you_.

Ben behaved, playing piano calmly under the light of the lamp making the whitewashed wooden room shine like porcelain covered in flickering shadows. The notes of the song rang out pleasantly. Ben was being _pleasant_. Such a gentleman, and Docteur Hux beside him, how dutifully he cares for the poor mad son of the Lady of the estate. Ben was still a trifle nervous, perhaps. Too pensive. But it was a vast improvement from his rages. It would take a clever one to figure out what preyed on his mind now that he’d gone quiet and introspective. What secret made that old look of anger flash across his face from time to time?

“Are you miserable here? With him?” Phasma had asked once as they smoked in the morning light. Hux brought out his own wooden pipe to show her. Miserable in Kamouraska.

Kamouraska. The seigneurial boundaries between fields affording each landowner access to the river would be impressed into the earth long after seigneurs became relics of a caste structure left behind. Long scars of gray-beige dirt bordering green and yellow, all of it sloping toward the great churning river. Agricultural land made up the majority of the region, transforming into hills and then sharp rock faces in the east and marshes and stony outcrops to the south. Rock sentinels lining the shore of the fearsomely wide Saint-Laurent. There were horses in the fields, and painted gabled houses in shades of white and deep blue and yellow. Farms had shingled barns going brown with age. The cultivated fields contrasted sharply with the tidal water’s edge, too sodden and full of muck to be tilled and so bursting with lavender and violet wildflowers. The land was at once soft and settled, yet still savage. A useful hound only a generation removed from gray wolves, with a slavering mouth and sharp white teeth, should he choose to use them.

Kamouraska. It was an Algonquin word, older than the French settlement practice that had absorbed it to refer to stolen land. _Kamouraska_ \-- “where rushes grow by the water”. True, though there was no lack of less flattering descriptors that would also be honest. Hux’s charge, Ben Solo of the Solo-Organa estate, had once told Hux that his eyes were like the river, pale green rushes and steely cold water mixed together and trapped in his irises.

In the city, solitude was a luxury. A jaunt to the country was seen as a time of tranquility, far from bustling streets and harried people and smoke and stink. In the summer that was true enough. The air in Kamouraska was sweet, the land heartbreakingly beautiful. But the other side of the coin of solitude is a blue and lonely hell. Confinement. Winter in the northern country is cold and desolate, turning the whole of the land black and white. The journey from Québec to Kamouraska, by boat and then winding road, was always dull and dispiriting. In winter, it was dangerous, and required a sleigh. The distance became the guillotine of possibility. In the prison of the snowy wastes, solitude turns from privilege into madness. With nowhere else to turn, impassioned minds are entrenched in their obsessions. In the fortress of the mind, evils spin on their heads and up becomes down until the vilest sins of man seem reasonable. Secrets fester in the backcountry, making a sort of stink undetectable by the nose. A brain-stink. Incest, murder, and suicide, all shoved away beneath the painted-wood faces of cheery houses to rot in the dark. Hux was not miserable in Kamouraska, but only because he had Ben.

‘The Docteur would always go and lock himself in one of the bedrooms alone with Ben Solo.’ Who had said that? Poe, again? Or had anyone said such a thing to the court? Surely not. Hux’s punishment would have been more dire.

In Kamouraska, in that white estate above the glittering Saint-Laurent, all the rooms were open. It made them drafty and cold, and yet those cursed twins went about opening closed doors. Forever opening doors, as though they must connect every room in the house together. The rooms one after another beckoned to Hux. Return here and live in this house again with your lovely patient, the loveliest man you’ve ever seen, and let him come to you at night with his dark eyes wide and pleading, rucking up your nightshirt and grabbing you with those talented hands.

Poe’s testimony, damning him. It was lies, mostly lies, spun for the court because Poe had loved Leia and Luke and Rey. Phasma testified truthfully: that Ben and Hux were never alone on the estate, Leia followed them everywhere, interested in Ben’s therapy. Her words did not save either of them.

The indictment: feloniously, willfully, and with malice, Armitage Hux did orchestrate the murder of one Rey Skywalker against the peace of our Lady the Queen. Always with the bloody Queen. Couldn’t you just die laughing? What did Victoria-beyond-the-sea care about a little murder, a little adultery, a little sodomy on a few acres of snowy waste that England once took from France? Armitage Hux, you are being charged in the language of your youth, the language you spoke in the dark with your love. Nothing mattered but the shape of Ben’s plush lips and the shape of the words on his lips. Let the Queen have every murderer hanged if she pleased, but not Ben. Not Hux’s love. Let him live, and let Hux belong to him forever.

Place your right hand on the Bible and repeat: ‘I do solemnly swear.’ Go ahead. We are all listening. The feather quill scratches over parchment. The clerk bows his head and writes. Everything Hux said, put down on the record forever.

_You want me to testify? Here it is, for the red room to hear. I loved him. I loved Ben Solo. I was as devoted to him as any lawful husband to their wife. Call me a shameless, unprincipled liar, call me a quack doctor, call me a predator, a beast, a...a slut! An abomination or crime against nature, a man’s whore if there ever was one!_

Hux had not said any such freeing words on the stand. He had intoned, “I am Docteur Armitage Brendol Hux, and I am not guilty of this terrible crime. I could never be party to my lady wife’s murder. My worst mistake, the only thing I could be blamed for, was not discouraging my ward’s obsessive nature harshly enough.” And he had cried, cried at the thought of Ben, poor dear Ben far from home and although a man grown, heartbreakingly boyish. Hux wiped his tears away with gloved hands. Such elegance. Such dignity. Oh, that it should come to this disgrace.

Docteur Armitage Hux, widower of the late Rey Skywalker, is a respectable man. A fine, upstanding Christian man. And so young, so handsome. Now maligned and slandered before all the world. Why, the affection he lavished on his wife...his late wife…. The attention! Embracing her by the hearth that first and last winter after their wedding, kissing her so tenderly and in the sight of all the household. So young to be a widower, only thirty-four, only six months married. And his wife, dead at twenty in such a horrifying fashion. A terrible, terrible shock. Of course Ben Solo cannot be blamed...while aged twenty-nine, he is a special case. A tender case, disconnected from reality.

Let Hux take the stand, tall and slim and haughty. Cunning but not cunning enough, not with the mess Ben’s made of it all. _I never asked him to do THAT to her, your honor_. Let Hux stand before everyone with his arrogant little smirk and his cold eyes. He could walk through fire and not be burnt. Tragic, implacable beauty, bowing to no laws but his own. Try not to wither under his gaze, sharp, the color of frigid water and green river rushes. Let him dig his own grave in the face of his wife’s utter destruction.

Oh, your poor beautiful wife, Armitage! Dead in the snow! Oh, what an enormous crime, Armitage! Who could have killed her in the cove of Kamouraska? The snow...and so much blood, and her pretty face, and your pretty face, all stained! Snow...snow.

Kamouraska.

It’s all your fault, Armitage, red-headed devil that you are with your knife-sharp eyes. In the front row, three white-wigged judges, the one in the center has Hux’s face, and he holds up a hand for silence. The deafening drum-roll stops, but Hux forges on, still shouting to be heard over the cacophony, his voice a bell in the night, deafening.

“I’m damning my soul to protect him!”

Suddenly, the crowd, struck by his confession, bursts out laughing. It spreads like fire through the rows, jumping from person to person in their black shrouds and with their rosaries fondled in sweating fingers. The judge orders the clerk to take note: _Hux is damning his soul to protect Ben_. Over and over the clerk rewrites the sentence. Fills up pages and pages, the quill scratching on parchment, never running out of ink.

Hux tosses and turns in the red room, unable to escape. He must stay and watch the next scene. His bedroom in Kamouraska, the four-post bed with white curtains and white sheets, a hot water bottle beneath the covers at the foot of the bed. It’s winter, frost on the windows. November, maybe. But November before his marriage. The door to the room creaks open and closed, invisible behind the curtains, and then Ben crawls into bed with him. Ben, warm and safe and here in Hux’s arms. Hux clings to him even as he says:

“We can’t. You know we can’t. We must stop.”

“Please, Hux.” Ben calls Hux by his last name as he prefers. Ben is good that way. Ben’s hands are on his nightshirt, ripping open the buttons at the top, scattering them, pulling the garment open to expose Hux’s thin chest. The light of the moon struggles to penetrate the curtains. It is dark, Hux can’t see, but he can feel. Oh God, he can feel Ben’s soft lips latching on to one of his nipples. Small, compared to Ben’s own. Ben is overlarge, muscular and sculpted, strong. That big nose of his is cold pressed against Hux’s chest, his mouth hot. It makes Hux groan, a sound he tries to stifle by biting his own wrist, and that encourages Ben. Ben applies his mouth to Hux’s nipple with fervor, licking and sucking at the little stiff peak, and then _biting_ it -- gently, so gently. Not at all like the last time Hux felt his teeth, when he bit Hux’s neck hard enough to leave a large bruise. At least that had occurred in the daytime, and the household had come running when Ben slammed Hux into the wall. As mortifying as it had been to be observed pinned up on the wall with his hair mussed and Ben biting down on his throat, Hux had been able to play it off completely as another one of Ben’s nonsensical outbursts, pure aggression. If the bruise had been given in the secrecy of Hux’s chamber at night, it would have damned them both when it showed above his collar the next day.

Ben’s hands are warm on his skin, hitching up the fabric in their way, splaying on his thigh, his stomach, avoiding the spot where Hux wants them most. His mouth sucks and his teeth graze Hux’s skin until his nipple is red and swollen, and then Ben moves to the other one, kissing across Hux’s chest. Hux has never been touched like this by a man. By necessity, his past trysts were short, no contact that wasn’t required to push both partners over the edge. This is something else. This is being consumed. Finally, finally, Ben’s hand wraps around Hux’s leaking cock. He’s harder than he’s ever been, cockhead drooling sticky precome onto his stomach. Hux jerks his hips up, trying to fuck himself into Ben’s fist. Ben pumps him, thumb dipping into the slit. The pressure is too much, grip too rough, nails sometimes grazing his sensitive flesh. It’s perfect.

The only sounds in the chamber are the rhythmic skin-on-skin of Ben palming his cock, Hux’s obscene moans and pants stifled against his wrist, Ben’s own ragged breathing. Ben rolls his hips down against one of Hux’s skinny thighs, hard length pressing there, needy. It’s huge, just like the rest of him. Eclipsing Hux in his borrowed bed in a wasteland of ice. Pressure builds in Hux’s groin, white-hot lightning arcing out through his whole body. He comes, spilling into Ben’s hand, whimpering against his own. Ben is nibbling at his left nipple, teeth sharp and dangerous so close to his heart.

Ben uses Hux’s come to slick himself, pumping his own cock toward release. Not asking Hux to -- Hux allows himself to be debauched, but taking a more active role in this mortal sin is something Ben must coax him into. Bad enough to let his patient wring the best orgasms of his life out of him in the dark of the night, right beneath his employer’s -- Ben’s mother’s -- nose. Ben gives up on his own hand and straddles Hux, rutting against the softness of his stomach and whimpering. It’s a cruel trick -- Hux could let it go on and get a rash from the friction of Ben moving against him for as long as it takes to peak, or he could end it himself. Hux takes Ben in hand, Ben panting against his neck, his ear. The angle is strange, but it won’t take long.

“ _Oh_ ,” Ben says, and comes on Hux’s skin, a hot, wet rush. He flops down beside Hux, pulling him into a lover’s embrace. This, too, is strange. Uncharted territory. And risky. But to send Ben out too quickly is to ensure his ire the next day. He’ll throw a tantrum, break something, refuse to speak in their sessions or to play the piano after supper. Keep Ben coddled, and he’ll follow Hux like a puppy, eager to please. Hux pulls the blanket over the both of them and lets Ben press every inch of himself against him from shoulder to toe. The room is cold, but Ben is very warm.

“Do you stay for me?” Ben asks, needing to hear it like he needs air to breathe.

Hux stays for the coin, he stays because it’s a job, he stays because the way back to the city is deadly in the ice. But: yes. He stays also for Ben, to see Ben in the morning light drinking coffee at the table with his family, a rarity before Hux’s arrival, his eyes golden in the sun. Ben’s lips trembling when Hux asks him something, pen poised to write the answer. Ben red with rage and throwing furniture, all his earthly might on display, muscles flexing beneath his shirt and vest. Ben curled up next to him in bed, sleepy and sated. Hux must stay awake -- he mustn’t drift off with his wayward patient snug against him, fondling him like a fair maiden. If they were found like this….the Lady of the estate would protect her son, surely, but at best Hux would be cast out into the winter and at worst the law would be involved.

“I love you,” Hux whispers, turning his head for the greatest pleasure of all. Ben’s lips on his, fitting together as though they were made for each other. What blasphemy! Ben melts. He’d be purring if he could. Nevertheless, his rage will shake the house tomorrow, when Luke approaches Hux in the drawing room to talk about his perky young daughter’s marriage prospects. Ben slams a hand into Hux’s chest when Hux doesn’t turn Luke down, walking him back against the wall. There’s shouting. Hux’s nipples are sore from Ben’s ministrations in his bed, sore under the fabric of his shirt though he selected his softest one, sore under Ben’s broad hand.

Hux, on Finn’s bed, struggles to shake himself free of the nightmare. Though he hadn’t witnessed it in reality, he sees the metallic flash of the sword flying, striking the doomed woman, cutting her down. He gropes in the red light, searching for an escape, tossing and turning. Knocks his hand against the bedframe and feels biting pain. Sobs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW:  
> Hux thinks about how his father used to rape the maids when he was young and wonders whether Kaydel is ‘grateful’ not to be subjected to the same.


	4. SOREL IN CHILDHOOD

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Into the past now! *imagine the Elmo in front of flames gif*

Calm. Soft light spreading over a sleepy little town down the river, in warmer and greener land. Sorel. A handful of houses made of dark wood and brick. The river flows close by between level banks. There are long green islands, property of the parish. Sheep graze there. Life is calm, radiant. There is not a soul to be seen walking the streets.

Hux feels he will be happy in this light. The river, lazy and unthreatening. The pastures sloping gently down to the water’s edge. Hux stretches, sighing. A deep sigh, for innocence regained. It’s his again, here in the summer before the storm. But something is happening. The light grows, changing. It gets brighter, too strong. Hux throws his arm over his eyes to shield them. It’s unbearable. It goes out again, the regular light of day dim by comparison.

A red brick house on the corner of Rue Battre and Rue Neige, quels noms! Were they named so? Perhaps not. Set off from its neighbors, bathed in gray winter light despite the flowering of the garden, the house sits. It shines as if magnified under a glass. Gleaming, glazed and bright. Covered in a thin layer of ice, so thin Hux could melt it with his fingertips. The blue hydrangeas are powdered white with summer snow. Two floors of red brick, green wooden shutters. Shut, as shutters are meant to be. Keeping the cursed light out. An elegant home. Absurd now, absurd to look at.

Hux cannot move from the circle of light. The rest of Sorel is in deep darkness, the sun setting at superspeed, his house in winter day. It stands out, glittering like a chunk of broken glass. How Hux would like to leave it behind him, escape from the clutches of his life.

His whole life, with all its turmoil and passion, building ceaselessly toward the only conclusion. Toward Ben. His life had ended when Ben went out from it, the light snuffed out. Ben, a caged wild beast lashing out at his zookeepers as they crack their whips, calming under Hux’s careful and trained touch, licking his palm. Now free but alone, lurking in shadow beyond the border.

Can’t Hux go back? Before it all. To the peaceful time before his own birth, laying dormant within his mother as she mourned her lot in life. Carried inside her womb like a stone in a peach. She tried to tear him out, sticking a wire up inside herself until blood flowed out around it. Brendol, Hux’s coldhearted father, had the poor woman restrained after that until Hux could be born. A necessary evil. His bastard son was better than no child at all. Desired by Brendol above nothing, except for the barren emptiness of his wife Maratelle’s womb. The kitchen woman -- Hux doesn’t know her name, he never has -- she drowned herself in the river afterward, unable to look upon him. His eyes were hers, but the orange fuzz on his scalp marked him unmistakably as Brendol’s, a perfect mix of the two. His mother’s worst memories made flesh. A wet nurse fed him. Hux left the house in Sorel young, destined for a boarding school that could never match his father in corporal punishment.

He would like to see the old rooms in the house again, the copper pots lined up in the kitchen. White fog like milk spreads over the town. The world turns, spinning while Hux stays in place. He fears that he won’t get the chance to go inside, and feels that he must, he must, but the spinning ceases. Only one house in Sorel is left unobscured. Hux walks toward it. The world is silent. His steps echo. Whatever happens here will be sharp as crystal. Pure and uncompromising, a judge’s verdict.

The mortar is crumbling between the bricks. Weathered brown vines cling to the courtyard wall. The green paint on the shutters is fading. The one to the left of the door is hanging by a hinge, knocking against the brick with the slightest breeze. A young man, coming home, ginger-haired and still uniformed in school attire. A coffin coming out the door, Brendol’s shadow darkening the house no longer. Hux fucked someone whose face he no longer remembers that night, the first time he had the privacy to take another man into his body. He remembers how it felt. They writhed together in Hux’s childhood bed, too small for the both of them. It was tender, if brief. Not like Ben, nothing could ever hold a candle to his nights with Ben, but sweet still. Sweeter than most. Hux sent the man on his way and crawled into his father’s bed after to avoid damp sheets, pleasantly sore and disinclined to be held.

Above the house, the sun goes out. Night is everywhere. Phasma takes his arm, guiding him up the walk toward the door. “You got us in a pinch, didn’t you?” She says, and there’s still fondness in her voice that makes tears prick his eyes.

 _God help me_ , he wants to tell her, _God help me_. The words don’t come. God cares not for Hux. He’s standing in the hall. The door to the drawing room is closed. What will he see if he opens it? The silence of the house is so complete it punches the breath out of him, leaving him bent over and wheezing, a policier’s sucker punch right to his gut. Phasma has disappeared. The smell of a house shut up tight for years invades him, surrounds him. Stings his eyes. Sticks to his clothes and hair. The plaster is peeling off the walls in great, large flakes. Dust coats the house like snow.

_Am I going to die here? Here under glass, suffocated by dust?_

When he straightens up and looks again into the gray air, there is a young woman dressed in white. Rey Skywalker, her gown long and glowing in the gloom, unsullied by the filth around her. She clutches river violets in her hands. They married in juillet, on the estate. A priest came out. It had to wait, though the offer was made in winter it had to wait so that a priest could come out and do the rites. Rey, her hair done up in braids and face veiled, her big hazel eyes looking at him hopefully, a little wistful smile on her lips. She might have been Ben’s. A first cousin, yes, and so the family property would stay in the same hands, though that reasoning seemed distant to Hux, watching brother and sister share the estate amicably without a marriage to seal it. She might have married Ben, if Ben weren’t a natural disaster trapped in the body of a large, strong man. If Ben weren’t unfit for his family’s darling girl.

Hux, his willing substitute. Did they know even then, in some dim way? Did they sense that Hux and Ben were one soul in two bodies, joined every night in secrecy? The marriage could have been a perfect arrangement, if Ben had any capacity for restraint. The land would go to Hux when Luke and Leia passed, and they were already graying. Ben’s absentee father would have no claim if he returned -- it was Skywalker land. Ben himself had been written out of the title in favor of Rey’s future spouse, due to his violent episodes. Let Rey flee when all was done, to another house somewhere after her protectors were gone and Hux went cold to her. The land would still be his by a husband’s rights. He and Ben must be careful. Yes, they would need to sneak around more. Go longer between their lovemaking sessions. Content themselves with quick gropes in the barn or make excuses to go out together when the weather was fair. Alas, that was beyond Ben. He had stolen into Hux’s bed again the night before the ceremony and begged Hux to call it off. It was a delicate matter, discussing a heated topic with Ben in the quiet of night. Ben was prone to shouting and destruction. Hux needed to stroke him, pet him, keep him calm and lovable and sad to avoid a broken bone or an awakened house.

Ben laid his troubles on Hux -- not the marriage itself. Marriages were contracts, expected of men and women in society, and he knew Hux’s heart was his. But his cousin? Ben was being made to share his lover, the first thing in his life that had ever been truly his alone, with his perfect cousin. Adored by his own mother and uncle where Ben was not. And more than that: he had heard Leia and Rey talking about the cunning little _baby_ that Rey would have. Ben would lose his love to his flawless cousin’s bed, diminishing their own opportunities for intimacy, and then have to watch her grow heavy with Hux’s child, and then see Hux carrying around the little _baby_ , a little tyke with chocolate brown hair and piercing green eyes, cooing at it, loving it. No doubt loving it, this one thing that Rey could do for Hux that Ben couldn’t. Another area in the shadowed passage of Ben’s life in which Ben fell short. Love that should be Ben’s alone snatched away and unreachable, bestowed on another living soul infinitely more connected to Hux than Ben could ever be, a child with Hux’s blood in its veins.

“Parents don’t always love their children.”

“Is that all you’ve got to say about it?”

“Do you want me to swear to hate my children for you? I’ll do it. For you. I’ll beat them like Father beat me.”

“God damn it, Hux,” Ben hisses, smothering him, mouthing at his face and lips and jaw, down his neck. Frantic. They don’t know when they’ll get this again.

“Don’t leave marks you brute— ah!”

Bruises sucked into his skin, mercifully lower than his collar but dusted over the entirety of his chest and trailing down his stomach in a line. Hux couldn’t throw Ben off if he tried. He likes that, in a way. Being helpless. Ben’s raw strength has always turned him on. The man is a weapon. It’s thrilling. Hux thinks furiously...he went to town the day before for a few hours, running wedding errands. He can pass the marks off as a woman’s work, some market whore Hux tossed Leia’s coin at. At least it’s summer. If they were trapped in the house under winter storms the jig would be up. Still, Rey will be dismayed when she sees them.

“You’re _mine_ ,” Ben says. Closes that exquisite mouth around Hux’s hardened cock.

“I want you inside me,” Hux breathes. It won’t happen again for a long time. Maybe years. Ben sucks him to completion first. Better that way -- Hux is languid, relaxed. Ben kisses him greedily as he fingers him open, aided by the oil Hux started purchasing five years ago for just this purpose...and it has been five years, hasn’t it? Five long years in Kamouraska, and yet gone in the blink of an eye. “You taste of me,” Hux murmurs between kisses, sticking his tongue in Ben’s mouth to chase the salt of his own release.

“Wish I could see you,” Ben says, but neither of them will bother with the lamp. Ben’s fingers are thick, but so is his cock. He presses three of them into Hux, toys with the fourth.

“Ben, _please_.” Hux never says please.

Ben sinks into him slow, and Ben is never slow. Never considerate. Even though they’ve mapped every inch of each other, there is room for firsts. Ben releases a shaky breath when he’s pressed in to the hilt, Hux’s legs crossed behind him and Hux’s arms on his shoulders, holding him there, holding him close. Ben fucks him with short, deep thrusts. Hux’s entire world narrows to the feeling of Ben inside him and Ben kissing him between labored pants of breath. Their noises are stifled even now, even Ben’s. To love each other despite all reason, in spite of the world, is never to forget the consequences of indiscretion.

“Hux,” Ben says breathlessly, the only warning before he’s coming, rocking himself through it, muffling his low cries in Hux’s throat as Hux pets his hair. Hux’s neck is wet. Ben -- he’s crying, his big body shaking with it, not withdrawing even as he softens inside Hux. Holding on to this time. He will remember it forever. They both will.

“Ben. Kiss me again.”

Hux looks at the vision of Rey standing in his childhood home, and mourns Ben. Mourns the loss of his kisses. Lost love. It had been a good wedding, not that Hux attended any but his own. He didn’t have friends. The ceremony was better with Ben locked in the house, raging in vain, tearing the walls open and reducing his furniture to kindling. Hux would have fumbled through the words with Ben’s hurt eyes boring holes in him.

When night fell and Hux was installed in a new room, not alone but with his bride undressing in front of him, he took her from behind, still clothed. She made no complaint, even moaning when Hux reached around to press fingertips against her sex just as Brendol had drunkenly instructed years ago, but as orgasm mounted Hux was unable to get Ben’s sad eyes out of his mind. Upset about the _baby_ , the possibility of a baby, the reason marriages were made at all. Hux pulled out and finished on her back, and that made Rey squirm from his grasp, looking at him in almost the exact same way Ben had. Bewildered, hurt. Hux stripped himself down, letting Rey see the dark love-bruises on his body. Let her see the monster she married, then. The man who had given her a chaste kiss on the lawn under the golden light of the sun, transformed in an instant into the sort of husband that would come to her marked by another and fuck her like an animal, but deny her the end. The point of the whole affair, of the contract, of the marriage before God and country: procreation. He fetched a rag from the toilette and came back to her with it, cleaning her up at least. He could do that much for her, the poor thing. She weathered his touch well, though he could tell she wanted to snap at him by the way she bit her lip. There was steel in her, just like in Ben.

 _I’ve made a mistake_. It was hell, entwining himself with another. A hell of Hux’s own making. He had vastly overestimated his own talent for artifice. He could not pretend to love Rey. Not for a moment. In fact, he hated her. He hated her unfairly and against all better judgement, simply because her existence in Kamouraska, and the existence of her father who had brokered the marriage, had placed Hux in this wretched position. Cut off from Ben at night and separated by day, too, by the gulf of Ben’s pain. And just as Hux could not pretend love, he could not mask his hate. Oh, his face was neutral. Guarded. But he knew the malice showed through in his eyes when he looked at Rey, brushing her hair out at her vanity or drinking tea by the window while she read. Teacup clatters against plate; she feels his eyes on her, feels the cold black sea of hatred within him she can’t begin to explain to herself.

Hux looks at Rey in the hall of the Sorel house, and makes a feeble sign of the cross in front of himself, his own arm heavy, turned to stone. Her smile widens, genuine, kind. Only a vision after all, because the true Rey would claw his eyes out. The same anger burned in her, laced up and decorated in chiffon, stilted by a girl’s upbringing where Ben was allowed to roam free. Rey drops her white dress down to the floor, a snowy ring around bare feet. Her veil melts into flurries of snow swirling around them, chilling the hall. She is bare, just as she was. Tentatively hopeful for something sweet from a stranger in a cold world. Hux backs away from her, shrinking back, holding his trembling hands up to ward her off. She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t know that Hux is incapable of anything more than wild carnality with her, and even that a sick sort of pleasure that makes him jittery afterwards instead of sated. Though everything functions as it should, spilling himself into her feels wrong. Uncouth, like spitting on the floor. Their couplings are an erotic mutilation of love, a cracked mirror of it, distorting the image.

Rey waits for him, waits for gentleness she won’t receive. “I can’t,” Hux tells her, his voice halfway to a sob. “It’s beyond me now.” He can’t complete the scene. Prison cracked his surface and enough of his infinite cruelty leaked out that he cannot do this now. He wants no more of it, and especially not here, where his father tortured the maids. Better the hall than the kitchen, but still he cannot. He wants softness. He wants love.

The door is open behind him. Hux flees.

  
  


Phasma is walking the path around the estate. Hux walks beside her. It’s summer, summer with no hint of witchlike snow. Ben is down by the river, idly throwing a line in to see if any catfish bite.

“You look pale, Armie,” she says.

“I always had the prison look about me, a taste of what was to come.” There it is; they’ve spoken of prison. He’d give his soul to keep it from happening, but by the time he stood before the judges he had no soul to offer.

“Two months and then out, you frail thing. They held me two years, held ‘at the court’s discretion,’ as they say. While the Docteur goes home and marries again….”

“The charges were withdrawn. You must have heard.”

“Charges withdrawn,” Phasma repeats, puffing on her clay pipe, offering it to Hux. Hux takes it, inhales smoke. It’s acrid and bracing. Exhales smoke. Sees Ben looking over his shoulder, watching smoke curl up from Hux’s lips. “Charges withdrawn, charges withdrawn.” Phasma bursts out laughing.

“We’re free,” Hux says, though it isn’t true in any way that matters.

“The judges scratch their heads, and the witnesses go home, and the reporters have to shut their traps. Both of us, free,” Phasma agrees.

“People say you’re a witch, Phasma,” Hux says. Phasma works at four houses, up and down the Saint-Laurent. She’s big enough for man’s work, but she does midwifery and cooking and pastry, and palmistry too.

“I always know if babies are going to live or die, but that’s easy. Right after they’re born, you give ‘em a lick. If they taste real salty, they’re going to die. I’ve never been wrong. New mothers are always sending for me. I’ve not been wrong once.”

“Have you ever seen a partial miscarriage?”

Phasma clicks her tongue, shakes her head sadly. “That’s nasty work.”

  
  


Hux floats in the river. It’s warm enough; it’s summer. In the winter the water of the Saint-Laurent freezes solid enough to walk on, but Hux has not wintered in Kamouraska yet. Ben sits with his back against a tree on the shore, watching from the dappled shade. Hux normally doesn’t like to be watched in a state of undress. He’s thin, too thin. His father always told him, spitting it like a curse. But he likes Ben’s eyes on him. Hux’s mother drowned in water like this. He almost calls it out at Ben gaily, the same tone of voice he might use to comment on the day’s nice breeze. ‘My mother drowned herself in a spot just like this!’ He toys, also, with the idea of letting himself sink, breathing out the air in his lungs and replacing it with the river. Wonders if Ben would save him.

The river is smooth and glittering, moving lazily now. The snowmelt that rushed in the earlier months slowing down. Hux looks at Ben and Ben looks back, seeing water sparkling around Hux and river-rush eyes peering up from white skin and soaked hair, the red darker when wet. He knows Ben thinks he’s beautiful. Can see it on his face. Ben’s face is an open book, it always has been. Hux was fearful at first, that everyone could see how much Ben wants him, how much he loves Hux, but Ben is a mystery to his family. His face is a language they can’t read, a secret language between him and Hux.

Ben is twenty-four and unattached, Hux even older. Twenty-nine. Of course, it’s different for doctors. Some don’t marry til forty. Ben will be twenty-nine when...but don’t think about that. Just look at him looking at you. He hasn’t touched you yet, and it won’t ever be quite the same once he does. You’ll miss the agony he stewed in, the way he wanted you so bad he could hardly eat, but folded his hands together instead, not daring to lay a finger on you. Because he knew it would change everything. That’s the power you have.

Hux wonders if Ben would save him, or if he’d fold his hands together and bite his lip, and let Hux drown untouched. Let the river carry him away. Perhaps things would have been better like that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW:  
> Hux's mother attempts an at-home abortion and then drowns herself after Hux is born.  
> On Hux and Rey's wedding night, they don't negotiate sex beforehand and Hux does not come inside her (as would be expected with the 'point' of sex in marriage being procreation). He sees that Rey is confused about that. She does not verbally complain. The sex before that point is consensual if under-negotiated.


	5. KAMOURASKA

Directly after Hux’s arrival at the estate, he is pulled into a hunt. He arrives late, crawls into bed. In the morning light he hardly has time to look upon the house at large or his appointed room before he’s being handed a pair of worn muck boots and a shotgun by a smiling, one-armed gentleman with twinkling blue eyes. It’s been years, but Hux was always a good shot.

The river islands are in their early morning hush, the narrow and winding inlets green with weeds. He waits long hours in near-silence, hidden in the rushes. The mud. Shotgun-blasts sound intermittently, fouling the air with the sour-sharp smell of powder. Birds, plummeting like feathered stones. Luke’s dog, lying in wait for a bird to fetch. Hux relishes the taste of mist, the feel of it on their faces.

“I’ve always loved this,” a rumbled baritone confession, quiet. For Hux’s ears only. His second companion for the morning is also his patient, for the foreseeable future. The young man’s large brown eyes, ringed with gold, study Hux. Measuring him. Picking him apart, looking for a soft bit to sink his teeth in.

Hux smiles. Ben is on his trail, stalking him like a good hunter. And Hux is getting Ben’s scent too, tracking him through the wetlands. Tracking you down, disgraced young lord of Kamouraska, you worthless game. Worthless to a world that can’t see through your outbursts. Not to Hux, and he knows that Ben’s value isn’t a glint of gold shining under tarnish. No, Ben is a wrongly-minted coin. An aberration made valuable  _ by _ the flaw, not in spite of it.

Blue smoke from Hux’s shotgun, chasing a deafening report. Ben’s rich voice: “That was a beautiful shot.” A bundle of feathers, white and gray, spinning down like a comet into the rushes. The handsome silver dog retrieves the bird with a red blotch on its chest, hands it to Luke. Not to Hux, though Hux made the shot.

“You know how to aim,” Luke calls out.

Hux thanks him, and then turns back to Ben. Already his tumultuous moods have shifted, taking offense at Hux’s verbal response to his uncle when Ben himself didn’t merit one. Hux files that information away. Ben’s plump lower lip protrudes in a pout, like a child. His cheeks are pink from more than the morning chill, his wild black curls flattened by his hunting cap. Hux doesn’t care for mud, but he’d like to lay Ben down in it right now and struggle against him. A fight or a fuck would be just as well, but he’d like a kiss most of all.

He doesn’t know a thing about Ben yet, but he knows more than Luke. Hux can sense the truth of that. Good family, but the boy’s a scoundrel. Hux will make him show the respect a Docteur demands. When the hunt is done he asks Ben to walk him around the property. His Lady mother, Leia, seems nervous at the prospect. She doesn’t trust her son, that’s plain. But she does not protest. The Docteur knows best.

The path cuts through a pine grove. Needles litter the ground. It’s full day now, but in the woods there are dappled shadows. The very air is green. Ben tells him in halting, sulking sentences about the estate. Two hundred and fifty acres of lands, fields and woods and islands in the salt marsh, access to the river. A bakehouse and boathouse, a little dock. Stables. A fine manor of whitewashed wood.

Hux chuckles. He’s lit his pipe, smoking as they walk. “How does it stay so clean? Like it’s not real. Clean as a white wedding dress.” Ben nods, his mouth quirking up in a wane smile.

The Lord of the estate, seigneur of Kamouraska, is Luke. His wife is dead. The Lady, therefore, is his twin sister. Her husband, Ben’s father, has run off and is presumed up to no good. There are two heirs: the pretty young cousin and Ben. Though of course, Ben is an heir to the estate only in blood. His mother tried to hide it from him, the business of changing the title, the lawyer in and out, the hushed discussion...but Ben is a perceptive man. There’s a provision barring Rey from tossing him out unless he becomes a danger to her person. Ben wrinkles his nose at that sentiment, brows drawing low and jaw clenched in seething anger.

Gorgeous Ben. Hux has never known temptation like this.

  
  


Ben lives differently than Hux. He is shielded from life and death. His family hides him behind big embroidered screens, covered with almond blossoms and exotic birds with sparkling beads for eyes. There was no boarding school for him. Private tutor after private tutor, all of them run off by the monstrous boy. But he’s learned enough. He reads everything he can get his hands on. He swaps fables with Hux, on his better days. He’s always eager for a story. The ones about God and the ones about men are acceptable, but he enjoys the ones about monsters most of all. He plays the piano. He dances. Strange that such a big man can whirl around the room with so much grace.

He and Rey are evenly matched dance partners, the both of them light on their feet and graceful beyond belief. Rey claps her hands and pleads for Hux to join in the fun. Hux feels himself color in preemptive shame. He has never liked making a spectacle of himself for the entertainment of others, even for someone as genuine and good-humored as Rey. Ben holds out a hand theatrically, and suddenly it’s worth it. Any humiliation is worth Ben’s willing touch.

Ben’s bare hand warm on Hux’s bare hand. Gentle, as though Hux is something precious. It seems ludicrous his family is scared of him -- in this moment Ben is the furthest thing from threatening. Ben’s other hand, on Hux’s waist, gripping the satin of his vest. His hand is huge on Hux’s slim frame. Hux should be irritated that Ben didn’t offer to let him lead. He’s not. Oh, what a shameless game they’re playing.

Hux lets Ben lead him, following his feet. Looking down at first, to make sure he doesn’t misstep. The white room shines, shadowed porcelain in the night, lamplight making the space ethereal. Two men dancing -- what a jape! Rey is delighted, laughing. Luke is smiling too, the corners of his blue eyes crinkling. Even Leia seems less stiff and anxious, watching Ben’s face soften toward a genuine grin in this moment. Amusement coalesces and refracts in the room as if they are held within a shining crystal ball.

“Look at me,” Ben murmurs.

“I’ll step on your toes.”

“You’re light enough. It won’t hurt. Look at me, Hux.”

Hux’s eyes find Ben’s mouth. His lips are quivering as though he might cry. Higher, higher. They lock eyes,  _ locked _ , an ornate cut emerald key sliding into the gleaming golden lock of a rich walnut wood door with a latch that will only open for Hux. They look each other in the eye, the skin of their palms together, tight-tight, squeezing. Embarrassment, helplessness, taboo...oh it’s there but it’s unimportant. Something else renders it powerless, like shining a cleansing light into the dark corner of a cellar, making the gnawing rats scramble away. There is no one else in all the world. There are only these two. No one else matters.

“Docteur Armitage Hux, do you take this woman--”

But that’s not right. It can’t be. Nevertheless, the scene continues. The cozy lamplight scorched out by the summer sun, Rey in his arms instead of Ben. Orange blossoms in her hands. No, no...it isn’t right, but it’s close enough. Close enough for the nightmare. He has to say “I do,” has to say it loud. Lifts her veil. The wedding cake, three layers high, covered in thick white icing. Luke sniffles into his handkerchief.

_ God, I’m a doomed man, married to someone I don’t even love. I didn’t think it was important. I didn’t think it would cut me so _ . It’s time to kiss her. Nineteen years old, and Hux thirty-four, and they’ve vowed they’ll be happy.

Hux opened his eyes in the red room, in Finn Harry’s bed, unable to sort out the recollections of his first marriage. The distance and detachment that should bring comfort did not. It was like seeing himself as someone else. The man dressed in his black wedding suit was not one and the same with the man laying in the red room now. He sank back down again, drowning, drowning….

Again and again the groom kisses the bride. She tastes of frosting. Hux twirls her around and is sick to his stomach. He shouldn’t be leading. It’s wrong. It should be Ben leading. The scrape of Luke’s fiddle pierces his skull. Hux must have had too much to drink. There’s whiskey and wine, he’s had whiskey. Whiskey and frosting meld when he kisses his bride. His  _ wife _ . Ben isn’t here, and he’s gone quiet. Raged himself into a stupor or sleep. Hux hopes it’s sleep. He hopes Ben isn’t in his room above with his ear pressed to the white floorboards, listening to the faint notes of the fiddle and crying.

_ I’m dying. My heart is breaking in pieces _ .

In the small hours, when the fiddle is quiet, the bride has her head nestled against his bare shoulder, her hand resting on his chest. On the bruises there. She says nothing about them. Good manners. Good breeding. She’s submerged deep in sleep, but Hux is awake. He apologized to her, trembling, after he cleaned her off. Apologized for his evil, using his tongue to do it, two apologies. One breathed out into the deathly silence of the room and one licked against her skin, tongue working against that fresh-cut gash between her thighs, healthy tissue gone red because Hux had scared her and hadn’t stopped. She hadn’t asked him to stop. She had simply frozen like a rabbit faced with a fox until it was done. She didn't ask him to stop his apology either. Her little hands gripped his hair, holding him close, holding his face against her until she shivered and gasped.

Her dress is a tangle of white on the floor, of satin and lace. The shutters are open, the moon comes in, drenching everything silver. A crash, in a distant room. Ben is awake now too. Enough energy regained to break something else. It’s amazing that there’s anything left to break.

  
  


The air of the riverside fills his lungs. Hux’s left hand has no golden band on it, but his heart does. And so quickly, too. The evenings are growing colder. His first winter in Kamouraska is coming. He looks at the flat banks of reeds and rushes and long-stemmed eelgrass, swaying in the wind. The wind has a bite to it, a chill. The water blends with the sky. He cannot see the other shore from here. There’s plenty of time ahead before the wedding, not yet planned. The barest idea of a marriage has not yet entered Hux’s mind, not yet been proposed. Five years of violence and despair and love sweeter than any white frosting lay before him.

The first time Ben comes into his room at night, the night after they danced, Hux startles awake at the sound of his entry and meets him at the door just as Ben closes it, half-formed questions on his lips. Ben kisses him hungrily. Like he’s starving and Hux is a feast. It’s brutal, possessive. Ben’s hands are on him, warm through the thin white cotton of Hux’s nightshirt.

“Ben,” Hux is saying, whispering it between kisses, his heart battering his ribs like a terrified bird trying to escape its cage. This is all he’s ever wanted. This is madness. And again, and again, Ben comes to him. Sometimes in the night, and sometimes brazenly, stealing kisses behind the house, in the  _ open _ . Ben, who has lived life behind an ornate screen, does not understand the consequences. He wants Hux not just in the refuge of his curtained bed but in the parlor too. Puts a hand on his knee there as they talk. Hux crosses his legs to budge it when the hall floor squeaks. All the doors are open, all the god-be-damned doors. Hux puts a stop to it, punishes Ben by ignoring him when he pushes too much. Rewards him with soft caresses and kisses when Ben behaves himself, confining his affection to Hux’s room at night.

It’s winter. Freezing cold. The road impassable, the river frozen with the fields, nearly indistinguishable from solid ground with its layer of snow. Geese on the shore. There’s too much wind, thundering across the open. He’ll never get used to it. It whistles around the house at night and rattles the shutters.

On stormy nights the wind sounds like the moans of the dying, but no one is dying here in Kamouraska. Hux is alive, and so is Ben, and the rest of the house. The people who do not matter. Ben and Hux, confronting each other. Hurting each other, insulting each other, kissing each other, loving…. Loving so much it wipes the slate clean. He’s a saint, Docteur Hux. Ben drives everyone out within the first summer, for they always come in summer, and they leave before the autumn. But now it is winter and Hux remains, allowing himself to be trapped here with Ben despite the torments and tantrums. A veritable saint, a godsend for our problem child. Leia is so grateful.

  
  


The manor burned down, down to the ground. There’s hardly anything left of it. Who else can boast wiping a place out like that? Wiping the past away all at once? Flames. A lot of smoke. Then, nothing. It’s evening. Hux is all alone, and yet there’s something watching him here in the petrified landscape of Kamouraska. Something motionless. He never should have come back. The charred ruins of the estate are black against the clear night sky. The front is almost intact, the door wide open. Always open, the doors are always open.

The drawing room window has a few panes of glass in it still, smoked-black. Upstairs, a lamp is burning orange in the air that once was Hux’s old room. Glowing orange and dead, a ghostlight. The ruins are coming to life. The walls wake up. They are meat-blacked bones now, the whitewash burned away.

Leia is alive, or perhaps just awake. She looms in the ruins, standing there the color of dust. “Hello, Docteur,” she says. “Welcome to Kamouraska.”

She wears a mourning veil, the transparent kind that looks green in moonlight instead of black. It is long, sweeping the ground. Hux steels himself not to cry in front of her now. Tears are mostly foreign to Leia. She was fiery once, like Ben, to hear Luke tell it. But: no more. She could be a stoic General, her emotions hidden behind a mask of a face. Hux and Ben are, in some ways, a study in opposites. But on the scale from Ben to his mother, Hux’s own mannerisms inch closer to Ben. He, too, is prone to theatre. Emotion, passion, superheated shouting and gnashing his teeth. Hux isn’t afraid of anything. He isn’t afraid of Ben, even though Ben could break him in two. He knows that Ben won’t, because the only thing Ben fears is boredom. They play out their madness together, two sides of the same coin.

Leia looks at Hux so sternly he’s sure she’s reading his thoughts. She speaks calmly, repeating the speech she made when Hux first arrived, leading him along through the house, her little shoes tapping on the floor, Hux stooped over slightly to take her arm. She’s a small woman. A sly trick, giving him this speech now.

“Good Docteur, there’s something I must tell you. My son is a good boy. But he will go off once in a while, like a loaded gun. I’m not saying you should try to get used to it. My husband never did, and to hell with him. You’ll just have to leave the room. Ignore him and leave him to calm himself, if you ever find him coarse or shocking. I’m not asking you to let him mistreat you. Just get yourself out of there. Come and find one of us.”

Ben rages. Hux has never seen anyone so feral. Hux asks the wrong questions, asks about Ben’s mother, and Ben backs him against the wall, snarls at him, looms over him the way Leia looms. Leia shouldn’t be able to do that -- she’s a small woman. With Ben, it makes sense. Hux is a tall man, if thin, and Ben is two inches taller. And twice Hux’s width.

_ Come and find one of us _ . Easier said than done with Ben’s hands braced on the wall on either side of Hux, trapping him there.

Once again in Finn Harry’s bed. Hux doesn’t have the strength to move his head on the pillow. He lays flat on his back, his eyes fixed on the rosary hanging above him. The sun still shines red, still…. It is impossible to move, not even his little finger. His body is weighed down. A corpse, ready to be shrouded and dropped in the sea, dropped overboard into the brine of dreams.

Torn to pieces. Slashed, cut, destroyed. Even her skull. The blade went through both her eyes, putting them out and punching through the back of her skull too. Her brains came out onto the snow. They laid her to rest beneath her family pew in the church. On stormy nights Hux hears her moaning in the wind.

He hears her sit up and get to her feet, her dainty feet, and walk through passages deep in the earth, from Kamouraska to Québec. Dark pathways beside flowing underground streams. Black water. The catacombs. Time means nothing for her. She flits back and forth, visiting Hux’s dreams and then sitting in her favorite armchair in the ruins of the manor. The velvet is withered next to the fireplace, the brick structure still intact.

She complains about how cold the earth is, how many masses she must attend. There’s little joy. Not like that night, when Hux and Ben danced for her. Does Hux remember that night? She knows he does. She hears the masses down in her hole, smells the swinging incense. She lays there and dreams of a happy marriage. Of a husband who grew to love her, who even tried. She talks to the others, tells them she’s waiting for her husband to join her. Says that his nasty temper will die with his blood, pooling sluggish and brown, and he won’t look so hatefully at her anymore. She’ll wear black this time, a black veil for him to lift. There’s enough of a face left for him to kiss. He never loved her eyes, anyway. This way he can pretend they’re Ben’s. Rey listens to mass and begs for God to send her husband to her. Everything is ready for him now. They’ll reenact the crime. Hux missed it, after all.

“This way, dear. If you’ll be good enough to follow me….”

Hux walks up the path to the manor, hard on the heels of his slim bride and her swinging hips. It’s not Leia under the veil after all; he doesn’t know how he could have mistaken Rey for her. The sixth stair still creaks.

She turns, looks at him without eyes. “Damn you, do you see what you’ve done?” She seizes his wrists, pulls his hands to the veil.

“No, no,” says Hux, but her grip is a cold vise, it is iron shackles, and he lifts the veil. It comes up, and her face is unscathed. Smooth, round cheeks, smiling lips, hazel eyes, pert nose. Chocolate brown hair braided up. Hux wants to thank her for this, for this image of herself, for the evil undone. He hugs her tight and she hugs him back. He could kiss her for this. Wishes he could make her forget the attack, the murder.

In the cove at Kamouraska. His young wife, six months married. Praise be to God, nothing has happened yet! Not yet. Rey looks at him and laughs. Her belly is sticking out, six months pregnant. Hux begs her to forgive him, caressing her belly and the little one inside, the one that works Ben up into a frenzied state of terror and hatred. It will be a little boy with brown hair and green eyes.

“You’re so pretty, and so kind,” says Hux, kissing her. “And one day, I’m going to kill you.”

The house is whole again, lit up gray in winter noon. Hux’s left hand sports no wedding band. Rey is slim and unmarried, flitting around the kitchen. The girl eats as much as a man, always snacking. It is Hux’s first winter in Kamouraska.

He is alone with Ben in the parlor. It doesn’t happen frequently, but today it does. Ben is screaming, red in the face. At any moment the door will burst open because Ben is screaming. The doors are never closed. Ben closed the door, he closed it so that he could kiss Hux. Hux doesn’t want to, it’s too risky, it’s too much. Ben is hurt. He closed the door for Hux. He has compromised, but Hux will not meet him halfway.

His tortured voice, going soft, going too soft. God, what has Hux done? What is the crime? “Hux, why won’t you do this...one...thing for me? Don’t I do as much for you? No, more.”

_ All I want is to love you. It’s not my fault that loving you will end you. All I want is to love you in the sight of man and God who will both damn us forever, damn us for love. All I want is everything you’ve got and more. I’ll scrape your bones clean and break them open and suck the marrow, nothing gone to waste. I’ll polish you up and decorate my home, nothing gone to waste. I’ll button my vest with your teeth _ .

Whose thoughts? Hux doesn’t know. The mirror is broken. Ben is waving his bloodied fist. One last sliver still clings to the wall, a triangle with jagged edges. Hux refuses to move. He’ll stand here forever. He does not look at the mirror. He faces Ben’s anger. It’s awful, like a wounded beast snapping for survival.

“You won’t kiss me here,” Ben hisses, thankfully not screaming it. “I’m good enough for you in the dirt.”

Covered in mud, his vest ripped open, buttons scattered. Can’t catch their breath, falling in the rushes together. Ben will take the blame for their disarray, Ben always takes the blame, always, always.

_ Ben, why did you let me take the blame? _

Little puddles of water splash beneath their weight, soaking their clothes. Pale green fern fronds stick to Hux’s shirt. Ben is on top of him, Ben’s weight crushing him down into the soft earth like a grave. They’re two wild men. They hold each other’s hands. Kiss each other on the lips, so hard they almost smother between the two of them. Undress enough to put hands on each other. Muddy hands pawing. Gritty mud on Ben’s flushed cock.

They needed baths when they returned. Hux ordered Ben to hit him, to bruise his cheekbone. It only took one swing. Ben wasn’t afraid to bruise him. Leia was horrified, and then relieved -- Docteur Hux would not abandon them, even after being wrestled into the river muck as a result of one of Ben’s fits. He was staying on.

Now: cleaned up, but for how long? Ben has a knife. He secreted a knife in his vest from the kitchen and he’s brandishing it. He throws it straight for Hux’s head. Hux barely ducks away in time. The knife is stuck in the white wall, stuck _ deep _ . Right at the level of Hux’s throat.

The door bursts open, Luke and Leia’s shocked faces, Rey behind with a hand raised to her mouth. They see the knife, they see the knife at the level of Hux’s throat, buried deep, shining below the purple bruise on his cheekbone.

“I’m going to kill myself,” says Ben, spitting it at Hux. He’s been this way since before Hux arrived. Hux ushers him out and makes him a cup of black coffee. “You’re a dead tree,” he tells Hux. “You’re a dead tree with lots of branches for me to hang a noose on.”

No one follows them into the kitchen. The tantrum is over -- it always ends after Ben has found the line and crossed it, this time with a knife in the wall. The others are in the parlor, straightening the upended furniture. The door is open. With shaking fingers, Hux strokes the back of Ben’s hand.

“Make it big enough for two,” Hux says. A noose to strangle in together. Ben takes his hand, takes it firmly. Looks at him with love, foolish, deadly love.


	6. FLIGHT

All ropes and straps out of sight, locked up. All belts taken and stowed away in Hux’s room, where the Lady of the house does not know her son spends his nights. The strictest of orders to the help: Ben Solo is not to be alone. Keep this man from hanging himself.

_ And destroying me along with him. Before the threat hung in the air like a body swinging on a creaking rope I didn’t know that losing him would kill me, but I know it now with certainty _ .

The wind cuts the gray sky far above the fields, making the clouds roil like a suspended sea. Rushing water dashes on rocks, on the stone oracles by the banks of the river. The manor, jutting above rising waters, is lost in morning fog thick as milk that will give way to icy rain. The storm rages for two days, outdoing even Ben in its ferocity.

Hux can’t sleep with Rey next to him. He listens to the storm. Listens to branches creak outside the house. There is a woman on the water, standing there as if it were solid ice, her white dress stained red. Won’t someone help her out of her sopping clothes?

In the day Hux is spellbound, held fast to a madman’s bed by golden shackles. The crazy patient and his crazy doctor, bewitched by love. Leia pays him, putting the coins into his palm, scratching it with her little nails as if clawing the earth up to bury the treasure. Hux eats little, though he does love the taste of river eel. He’s thin. He’s always been thin. Leia worries about him, he knows. She sometimes folds a buckwheat cake into his palm with the same solemnity she does the coins.

Ben has recovered from the wedding. Hux kisses him and then works a hand into his trousers in the drawing room. The door is closed; Hux put his foot down on the matter. Ben is making marvelous progress. Privacy helps him to overcome his need for performance, for theatre, for shouting. The evidence is in the air: Ben is quiet. He’s quiet with Hux’s cravat stuffed in his mouth and Hux’s bare hand working him.

The last winter in Kamouraska is coming. The road is not yet a long white path to probable death. Luke suggests that the family get out of the house, go somewhere else for a while before the freeze. Leia asks Hux where he’s from.

Sorel.

They go to mass in Kamouraska, first. Hux bows his head in Christian resignation, pale and thin and selfless, his life dedicated to healing the minds of others, the image of a saint. He says the Our Father mechanically, but four words grip him. They wake him up all at once, in a savage frenzy. He sinks his teeth into them. The church is made of stone going green with moss. It is drafty. The stones of the floor have still water in the spaces between. Hux wrenches the four words out of the text and devours them, making them his own forever.

“Deliver us from evil.”

The evil he must be delivered from takes the shape of the beautiful woman sitting next to him in the family pew. Her dainty gloved hands, one of them in his. Her fine gray woolen coat and pale blue dress beneath. Her thick brown hair braided up and hazel eyes fixed on the priest and his sermon. On his other side sits Ben, his knee touching Hux’s, legs spread wide to achieve it.

What a pretty sight when mass is over: the younger Lord and Lady of the estate at Kamouraska, walking arm and arm down the stone steps of God’s house. The beautiful wife, smiling sweetly. Her dashing husband, smiling back at her. Outside, a fond look on his features, though his eyes are rather cold -- it’s only the unusual color of them, surely. They  _ seem _ cold, cold as a rushing river to drown in. Hidden inside of the delicate, handsome face with its fond expression: a violent counterpart. Later, the townspeople will remember Hux’s smile more as a smirk, betraying the darkness in his heart. His paltry tenderness is a film of angel’s skin laid over deep loathing, as thin as clear ice. Melted with a fingertip.

  
  


There is just enough time to say goodbye to Kamouraska. Take a good look at the woman, covered in snow. She comes toward you, rising up out of a snowbank out on the ice. The long flat expanse of snow melding with the sky on a blurred horizon, the other bank of the river invisible from this point. The lovely cove between Kamouraska and Saint-Denis. She tried to run, she tried to run when the house caught fire.

She was so  _ frightened _ .

She’s lost, standing out against the white ice below and white winter sky above. She wears white, because that’s how Hux remembers her most clearly. Her veil is lifted for a kiss. Her eyes are gone, put out by cold hard steel. She comes forward, reaching, reaching for him.

Hux cries out. The vision of his murdered wife is about to pounce and knock him down. Perhaps she’ll crush his green eyes to jam with her thumbs. It would only be fair. She pounces. Breaks against him like Hux is made of stone. Shatters, brittle and frozen. Shards of her penetrate his very being. Thousands of splinters of Rey stuck in his flesh. He is possessed, from the red roots of his hair to the tips of his fingernails. Rey, multiplied beyond all measure. As if they were crushed in a mortar together, pounded into a mass of tiny fragments and indistinguishable from each other anymore. Each miniscule grain bears the burden of crime and death. Her blood shed. Her skull opened like a wine bottle. Her heart stopped at nine o’ clock at night precisely, on janvier 31, 1839. Rey mills about in his bones. Rey, murdered, crawls the length of his soul, poking and prodding curiously.

_ I’m dying, I’m dying _ .

Hux sits up on the bed with a start. The rose pattern on the bed curtains looks like bars, bars holding him prisoner. Four walls to grip him and hold him down like a palm on his chest, the other fist clenched around his throat.

Hux turns. “Oh, Renaud. C’est toi. There you are, darling.”

Renaud stares at his father, a look of terrible fright in his wistful coffee-brown eyes. “You screamed, Papa. Are you sick too?”

“Me? Don’t be thick, boy.”

This is more like the Papa Renaud knows. The child seems less troubled. Hux starts to get up. Renaud rushes to the bed on his little legs, putting his hands on the covers, looking up. He repeats the doctor’s orders in a high-pitched, stern tone. Hux must rest.

“All the care you give Mama. You’re sleepy.”

Oh, that these children could save him. They perhaps had -- from the cell. But not his soul. Hux leans down and gives his son a kiss and a hug, and asks after Mama.

“Sleeping. Kaydel is there.”

“What a good little boy you are,” Hux says, watching his son grow wary of him again. Wary of praise. Perhaps Papa is sick after all. Oh yes, sick in his rotten head. Hux really must get up. Keep watch over Rose with their devoted maid, follow her as far as he can over the narrow plank leading to death. Until he can’t take one more step without dying himself. He’ll leave her alone to take the last step over, watching her disappear. Watching the thread snap and wave over the void. A widower again.

This time Hux’s hands are clean. His wife’s name is not Rey Skywalker, it is Rose Tico, and he’s going to see her off. Walk with her to the brink of death.

  
  


This dangerous sluggishness in your head will be your undoing, Hux. She’ll pass without you while you dream in the next room. It’s that damned potion the doctors gave you. You’re drunk on dreaming, babbling in the second-floor guest room in your house on Rue du Parloir, Docteur Hux. Your wife is gasping her last, and where are you?

Hux’s eyelids droop in spite of himself.

Sorel. The house on Rue Battre, which Hux is sure wasn’t its name, is open to the mild October sun. The russet leaves fill the tree-lined street with red splendor. They scuttle by on the wind. There is no birdsong, or sound of children running, nor a neighbor sweeping up the leaves off his walk. The town is emptied like a squash with the insides hollowed out. Only Hux’s house is left standing.

Just what is needed for his trial.

The dead leaves crinkle underfoot on the garden path. The threshold is dappled with shadow from the red and yellow leaves not yet fallen, rustling in the wind. The hall is abandoned, the drawing room closed. Hux always closes the door. Someone is waiting on the stairs.

Phasma is there to welcome him. Hux doesn’t like the look of her grin. She knows the story, of course. She tells him so. “Armie, you know just what’s going to happen. Let there be no pretense between us. We were friends, weren’t we?”

“We were,” says Hux. “But I’m sick. I need to rest.”

“Step into your old room.” Phasma disappears into the gloom of the hallway.

Hux follows. Nothing has changed from his fateful time here with Ben, frozen in place like a museum. The green drapes on the bed are tied up with silver cord. His quilt is there, his model ships from childhood. He doesn’t dare step in the door.

“Go on,” Phasma scolds him. “Begin again, after your return from Kamouraska.”

Hux struggles to put one foot in front of the other, and then collapses on his bed. Flat on his face, sobbing. Sobbing his heart out. Phasma leaves him to it. Feet patter around the bed, little feet. Living children, or dead ones? Cloying dried roses fill the room, and then the stench of death. Dead mice in the baseboard, surely. Hux sits up and claps his hands together, dispelling the ghosts.

Luke sits in the corner, in the rocking chair there. “It’s too bad there’s no baby on the way yet,” he says conversationally, as if he knows. As if he knows the way Hux uses his daughter. Truly, Hux doesn’t mean to. Each time he intends to complete the act. Intends it with all his heart, but his passion fizzles out or he pulls away at the last second, spilling harmlessly -- harmfully -- on the duvet. Not onto her skin. He can spare her that much.

Hux can’t stand the idea of Ben moping again. They’ve only just regained what they lost with Hux’s betrayal, his continued betrayal, and if Rey’s belly starts to round out Hux knows Ben will sink into deep melancholy all over again, dreading the arrival of another living soul that will take Hux’s attention away from him.

Rey has friends in Sorel; an unforeseen boon. She stays over with them one night in three. Hux wonders whether she tells them about her hideous husband or whether she secrets it away in shame. He’s never left to his musings for long. In Rey’s absence at night, Ben creeps into his room. Hux leaves the door unlocked. He’s changed the little bed of his youth out for a large one. Luke takes the shabbiest room, insists on it. Leia the master. Ben the couch in the drawing room. With Rey’s place empty, Ben is all too happy to fill the gap.

He trips over the chair once, curses under his breath, foul and angry language. It makes Hux laugh, and then Ben is on him, smothering him with kisses.

“Funny, is it? You set that trap.”

“I didn’t.”

They moan and groan only a hair above a whisper. In pain or pleasure, it doesn’t matter. The crime is the same. They’re guilty.

In time, Rey and Luke want to go back. Ben argues. He’s not ready. He’s grown quite used to getting Hux to himself two nights a week, all to himself. He says he doesn’t want to go back to the wide country. It’s boring. Rey says he’s hardly left the house here, so what difference is there? Ben and Rey get into it, have a proper row. She’s meaner now, more sure of herself than she was before an unhappy marriage.

“I’m packing my bags,” Rey says. “I won’t stay here another minute.”

“I’m staying here,” Ben says. “If you take me back I’ll kill myself.” Looks at Hux, behind her. “I’ll kill myself, Hux. In Kamouraska, on the beach.” He charges then, knocking Rey aside into Luke, who catches her. Leia bellows at him, but he pays her no mind. He lifts Hux off the ground, and kisses him on both cheeks, left then right, as if greeting him on the street. Hux’s feet kick at the air. Ben isn’t even holding him against the wall. He’s just holding him up. “You know, I’m out of my mind, Docteur,” Ben growls. “Pray for me, won’t you?” This, directed at his family. Then back to Hux. “I  _ need _ my doctor. Won’t you stay? I’ll kill myself there, and I’ll kill myself here without you.”


	7. SOREL AGAIN

“Good morning, Armie. How did you sleep?”

Phasma, with a pitcher of hot water and a rag and bowl, bustling in. She sets the items down, throws open the curtains. The light is a rolling tide breaking against the bed. Hux groans, puts his hands over his face. Phasma was never his maid at Kamouraska, but Hux is not in Kamouraska. Ben is snuggled in beside him, his chest bare, one arm draped over Hux.

The first thing Hux did in Sorel: hire Phasma to stay there too.

“Can’t go on living in the dark,” Phasma quips. “Your really big scenes are coming up. You’ve got to deliver them in the spotlight.”

“Your mistress married a beast,” Hux tells her. In strictest terms Rey is not Phasma’s mistress -- she was employed by Leia -- and Rey is already gone, packed and gone back to Kamouraska with her husband and cousin left behind.

“All men are like that.  _ Beastly _ .” Phasma kneels down, fixes a fire. It has the look of a fire, but the light doesn’t flicker on the walls. It’s flat, and the hearth gives off no heat. A fire with no warmth or brilliance. Hux looks at the bedsheets and sees the fine weave of the cloth as clearly as if he held a magnifying glass to it. He looks at Ben’s arm and sees the individual hairs on it. He can trace out each little black vein in the marble top of the table by the bed as they branch off of one another, smaller and finer.

This is real life. Ben’s arm, heavy on his chest in slumber. There’s nothing more real than this. Hux looks up at Phasma, sees the teeth in her grin stained from tobacco. “Say anything, Phasma, only say something.”

She does, too loudly. “God above, look at that mark on your arm. It’s all black and blue.”

“Don’t shout. Someone might hear you.”

“There’s no one here.” Is that true? It might be. Hux can’t decide. Phasma says, “Ben did it to you. I’ll tell the judges.”

“He doesn’t mean to.”

“No shame in it. Better to have a few bruises than to never be loved at all. No shame in  _ this _ , but you better get used to it anyway. This is only the beginning of your life’s shame. The worst is yet to come.” The room ripples, changes.

Hux is bathed and dressed. Phasma stands against the wall, flanked by Poe Dameron and Dopheld Mitaka. The least number of staff necessary to run a house. Phasma and Mitaka are Hux’s selections, Poe...Leia’s. Leia left them Ben’s horse as well, stabled out back. A fearsome black beast. Hux kneels by the bed, warm wet rag in hand. He insists that the servants leave. They go out, reluctantly. Poe, most reluctant of all.

Now Phasma is on the stand before the judges, saying, “Ben Solo was never alone in a bedroom with Docteur Armitage Hux. Not in Kamouraska, and not in Sorel. Ben Solo’s mother, the Lady Leia Organa, or myself were always with them.”

Poe’s derisive laugh pierces the house from outside the room, louder than any human voice should be. Loud enough to be heard outside. “I swear, the Docteur spent a lot of time alone with Ben Solo. With the doors closed.”

Hux senses, to his horror, that it’s all about to happen, and that nothing can stop it happening now for a second time. His wife has deserted him, and therefore is in her heart of hearts complicit with everything that will come to pass. Ben lies in bed, sick. Not sick in body. He has been, his whole life, as healthy as a man can be. Sick in mind. He says the light hurts his eyes. Hux closes the curtains, cursing Phasma for opening them.

Ben says there’s an emptiness in his chest, an emptiness beyond belief. It’s hard to bear and go on living, by now a lesser man would be dead and buried. He does exactly what Hux tells him. They go through the motions, even though Hux knows there’s nothing wrong with Ben’s chest. He lays his ear on Ben and tells him to breathe and to cough. Hux pokes along Ben’s ribs. He hears the beating of the empty heart, drained by the doctor listening to it. His head rests against Ben’s broad chest, copper strands of hair not slicked back yet. It’s morning. Ben winds his fingers through Hux’s hair, and Hux allows it. Terror casts shadow-silhouettes in the room, and pleasure lights it.

_ I’m innocent! _

No one could find fault with this scene should they witness it. Yes, Hux sent the staff out, but only because Ben likes privacy. Hux examines his patient. Nothing untoward -- nothing like Poe Dameron implied, not this time. But innocence won’t last.

Ben throws his arms around Hux in the drawing room, in sight of the staff. He doesn’t care that this is just what the judge is waiting to see, the image that will be weighed against Hux. Ben bursts into tears, tells Hux how miserable he is. He can’t hold back the flood. It’s lucky most of his words are unintelligible. Such a scene might even be expected in Kamouraska -- why does it feel dangerous in Sorel? Ben is his patient. There is nothing untoward here.

“Love can really make idiots out of fine men,” Phasma mutters. “This affair of yours, Armie...well, I’ll never get over it, believe you me.” She looks disapproving. She looks fascinated.

Hux could still escape, and not force the rest to happen again. Go back to Rue du Parloir. Just open his eyes and sit up, and go into the next room where Rose is dying. But, too late! It’s too late. The past cuts open his veins. He walks his own tracks, putting his feet in the footprints he left long ago in the snow. Crossing through illicit love, obsession, murder and death. The ice cracks below and frigid water washes over him, salty sea waves where a river should be. He is pulled into the depths, touches the bottom of despair. It makes no difference as long as he finds his love again. And finds him well. Bursting with life, tall and strong and bright-eyed. Worried about how much Hux has suffered without him. Eager to pick up where they left off.

Ben is fingering the golden watch chain hanging along Hux’s trim waist. The watch was a gift from Rey. Hux wants to find anger in Ben’s heart instead of sadness, when they meet again. He wants to find fire. He’ll steal some away for himself, coals in the belly to fuel his metal innards, a machine-man with a mind like a ticking watch.

_ I’m in love, and not with my wife. I’m in love with a man. I have been, now for _

_ five _

_ for twelve years _ .

Ben’s absence is more than Hux can bear, even as they stand together in Hux’s bedroom at the house in Sorel. But it is Ben who voices what they both think:

“I will not go back to Kamouraska. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand seeing you off into her bed, not having any of you for myself.”

Hux argues, Ben cries, Hux pleads with him, Ben threatens to jump from the window. Hux tells Ben the way that the world works. Ben says he feels faint, says his head is killing him, he’s short of breath, he has night terrors, he’s deeply depressed, please won’t Hux care for him? It’s mildly surprising it took Ben this long to demand attention in exactly this fashion. Leveraging his status as Hux’s one and only patient. He saved it up, aware of how quickly Hux would become frustrated with it.

“Is this how you let your patients waste away and die? Don’t you even try to save them?” Ben chases Hux through the house, trying to corner him. “Docteur, I’ve gone mad. Docteur Hux….”

_ You shouldn’t be so insistent, Ben. My mind is made up, you know. Day and night, I think only of you. It’s just that moving forward now is madness. I’m being ripped to shreds by the vile love in my heart. It’s devouring me. I’m possessed, utterly possessed by you. Bad enough to feel you in the depths of my bones. But to breathe my evil wants into being…. Why must you ask it of me? _

One night when Ben comes to bed he is carrying Hux’s straight razor in his hand. He holds the edge to Hux’s throat, leaning over him and looking down, his face neutral. “You’re a real bastard to me,” Ben says.

_ It was preordained _ , Hux thinks.

“A child of mine will never come to life in your cousin’s womb. It will never take root. It will never knit itself a face in the darkness. I promise you that,” Hux says. Takes off his ring, gives it to Ben. He doesn’t care what Ben does with it. Let him toss it out into the yard. It’s enough for that night. The razor and ring are set aside. Ben’s mouth is soft above his carotid instead.

Hux has one idea, and guards it like a lunatic ready to be put away, clinging to the specter of that one idea. He’s given up the pretense of sending Ben to bed apart from him. They shut the door and undress and crawl in together like a married couple. When Hux washes himself clean he does it like a sacrament, born again into a new life, determined that no hands but Ben’s will touch him. Untouched and untouchable, but for the one man he loves.

“Keep me by your side forever,” Hux says in the dark of night. Ben holds him close, big body shaking with emotion. “My one joy,” Hux purrs, kissing Ben’s damp, salty face. In the day Hux laughs or cries for no reason at all. He feels strange. His body is lighter than it's ever been. He doesn’t eat. His hands shake. He survives on coffee and tobacco.

“We’ll leave,” Ben says. “We’ll run away.”

“They’ll know. They’ll send after us.”

Ben’s face, illuminated by the moon. Rage on his face, the sort of rage that doesn’t count the cost. Hux bathes in it, lets Ben shower him in holy wrath. They play chess during the day, on Brendol’s old board. Ben never wins. Hux beats him before the game starts, sees the moves Ben will make written on his face. Hux loves him wildly, madly. Wants to go into the dark and follow the night stream of sin with him back to the source, leaving all else behind.

“Why did you marry her?”

They sit on the couch. Ben is reading a book from Hux’s selection. Hux is tossing a wooden ball in the air, catching it each time it drops, his wool-socked feet in Ben’s lap.

“I don’t bruise her.” Hux is covered in bruises. He’s spent the last five years covered in bruises. It’s a deflection -- he doesn’t mark Rey’s skin. He’s not stupid enough to believe that means he hasn’t tortured her.

Ben’s whole face quivers. One of his hands comes to Hux’s feet, squeezing gently. “Do I mistreat you? It’s only because you mistreat me.”

The light coming through the curtains is red. A rosary hangs above. Ben and Hux recline on Finn Harry’s bed, in the Québec house Ben has never seen. Hux’s sock feet are in one of Ben’s hands, a book from the house in Sorel in the other. Hux tosses the ball. Catches it.

“What would you have me do, Ben? One word and I’ll obey. Run away? Leave my wife, my three children? Run away from Rue du Parloir? I’ll leave this whole world. We can hang together if that’s what you want. That’s how far I’ll go to meet you.”

Jump off the bed and dim the lights, the scene changes again. Walls rotating like set pieces. They’re back at the chessboard.

“Checkmate. Really, love, did you even try?”

Ben sweeps the pieces to the floor with a grunt. Nasty loser. Nasty man. Hux laughs, delighted.

Ben reads in bed. Hux reads from his shoulder, barely skimming the page. Their skin is warm, nestled together beneath the quilt. Hux’s hand dips low over Ben’s stomach, fingers carding the dark curls between his thighs and then closing around his cock.

How wonderfully selfless, to choose medicine as a calling. Compassion cut deep as a wound. Hux should find it very comforting, this evidence of his compassion. Fighting evil and illness. Why is it then that no one likes him? They’re wary. The selflessness is too obvious. Some other fearsome identity lies beneath. An original flaw, deeper than language and religion. It’s not sin. It exists beneath human logic, a chip somewhere at the back of Hux’s pale emerald eyes, invisible but sharp. Run fingertips over it and get sliced.

Is it innate? Or born of some terrible grief? Did your father turn you out of the house, Hux? Did your mother breathe water rather than look upon your face another moment? Is it contagious? Hold this man at arm’s length, send him away before he pollutes and infects you.

Ben gropes for his body in the darkness. He says words, but they’re strange. He’s speaking French. He always speaks English with Hux. Hux’s brain, pleasure-addled, fails to decipher the words before they’re lost to him. Lost to time. Time ceases to exist. They’re naked, lying together for eternity.

Hux murmurs against Ben’s shoulder as Ben sinks down onto him, letting Hux spear his body open. “I swore I’d be a saint, Ben. I swore it. God, you’re so good. You feel so good.”

“Do you not think you’re a saint?”

“Ben….”

“Could have fooled me. That ego is really something.”

“ _ Move _ .”

Ben does, making delicious noises as he fucks himself down onto Hux, powerful thighs flexing. It makes Hux’s cock leak inside him. “Good?”

Hux nods, not trusting his voice. He savors the tight drag of Ben’s body around his. Groans when he clenches. Ben is making little keening, whining noises as he moves, his face blotchy red. His cock, too, is red. They don’t stifle themselves with cloth or flesh, though the house in Sorel is smaller. Hux comes first, and Ben strokes himself furiously after, trying to catch up.

“Here. Come here.” Ben moves up at Hux’s beckoning, straddling Hux’s chest, and lets Hux suck on his cockhead as he pumps release out of himself, gasping. Hux swallows what he can. Ben pulls back and the rest of it hits his upper lip.

“Wait,” Ben says as Hux’s tongue darts out to clean it. Ben lays beside him, tilts his face up with one warm hand and kisses him clean.

Hux dreams of taking aim at Rey through the windows of the estate in Kamouraska. Standing in the rushes with Ben at his shoulder, sighting her with one eye open, and pulling the trigger. A red star appears on her white breast, his wife shot down like a partridge. Hux would take her rook, take her queen, just as easily as Ben’s. The game was lost before she started to play.

A woman made of stars lined up together so closely as to resemble a shining net of diamonds. A man made of endless night, cold void where stars should be. A marriage, so pathetic. Torturing each other, humiliating each other. Lying next to Rey, caressing her and being caressed by her as he thinks of another, as she thinks of another -- surely she must. Hux must repulse her. Does she also think of Ben? What a funny thought that was, and not implausible — she might have been  _ his _ bride, were Ben not so volatile. Does she dream of Ben when Hux is inside her, or when the slide of his tongue against her makes her cry out? Does she picture Ben, a different Ben? One gone docile and sweet from routine bloodletting, perhaps. Anemic and passive, but just as handsome. Tough luck. She’s stuck with Hux. They open and shut each other like books incapable of holding their interest. They get up the mood to try again and then clap the pages shut with a sneer of disgust. Ravishing each other, raping each other. Exchanging kisses but not words. Words die in their throats when they are alone together.

Hux will end it. He’ll bring back the justice of old, the law of the vanquished and the victor. The queen tumbling from the chessboard with a savage swipe of Ben’s hand. Even in sleep the image strikes Hux like a lightning bolt, and remains when he wakes. In a flash of intuition, he glimpses himself. Finds himself in the marrow of his own bones.

Admits the sickness within him, the frenzied yearning to merge his wildest ambitions with the living world. He calls Ben up from sleep though the sky is deep lavender, the sun not yet peeking over the horizon. The window is glazed over with frost, the first snowfall of the year sharp on the air. Metallic, like copper. Like blood. Yes, Hux is the one who speaks in the darkness. His voice is the voice of passion, seeking out Ben’s fevered heart.

_ Let ourselves both be damned forever. Each with the other. Each BY the other _ .

Hux, the malicious and sinister stranger that Rey wed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW:  
> Hux again refers to loveless sex in marriage as rape, asserting that he and Rey routinely rape each other by going through the motions of sex without being in love.


	8. MAKING PEACE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this pic of Kylo is a manip but I couldn't find the creator -- whoever made this if you want it removed just let me know, or if you know who made it sound off in the comments so I can credit.

Hux looked at the rosary gleaming in red light and thought, _Is this what sleeping will be like now forever? A couple of hours filled with horrid dreams, and then awake?_

He sits up. The bed is in a small cabin standing in a flat, deserted field. Off on the horizon, the edge of a deep pine forest. The cabin is filled with people. Faces he knows, and faces he might have known. The center judge has doffed his white wig. He stands next to a man with brown hair and green eyes. All of the people are worried about some little pet of theirs that’s roaming loose. Frightful things will happen to it unless they find a way to bring it back right now. Everyone turns and looks at Hux. Everyone, without exception. They all have green eyes.

They beg him to ‘call’ the animal home, and Hux is struck with terror. It’s too soon. One wrong move and he’ll go back to his cell, he’ll be caught again, calling the animal is an admission of his guilt. From every side of the bed they press closer, hands reaching out to touch, to urge him on. Every second could mean the death of the creature still on the loose out there. Hux cries out, and the sound is so harsh and terrible that it tears at his chest and leaves him stunned. There’s another man at the edge of the forest, a man who doesn’t fit. His white teeth are sharp. He’s on horseback, as he was that night. If Hux makes another sound, it will summon him like the demon he is.

In which of his dreams did Hux summon them both? Not just his love, but the other too. His wife. As if he can’t call one without the other. What entertainment for the worthy citizens of Sorel and Kamouraska, and yes, Montréal and Québec too. Perhaps even our Lady the Queen across the cold and choppy sea. This will touch all of them. Thanks to Hux they’ll get their taste of life and death, in a dizzying whirl like a dance that ought never have been danced, it frightens them off and yet lures them on. Blessed is Hux, through whom the scandal cometh.

Mitaka and Poe are in the stable, mucking about with Ben’s ill-tempered horse, at least one of them nursing a horse-bite. Phasma knows. She’d have known even if she never saw them together -- Phasma knows things. She knows when babies will die, and she knows love when she sees it, especially if it shouldn’t be where it is, misplaced like an errant bag of sugar.

They’ll hear it when Poe and Mitaka come in, Hux thinks. Thinks it ruefully now, for he knows better. Ben pounces on him in the drawing room, and instead of pushing him off after a few moments of heated fumbling and guiding him upstairs to bed, Hux is straddling him on the couch. In Ben’s lap, Ben’s hands on his ass, Hux’s white hands buried in Ben’s black hair. Black and white like Kamouraska in winter.

Winter has come to the world, both Kamouraska and Sorel. It’s snowing outside the window. Within the month the journey to Kamouraska will be perilous. Ben’s hands grip Hux hard. He intends to keep him. Hux kisses him. He needs these kisses like air. They don’t hear the sleigh. Why don’t they hear the sleigh? She must have had the bells stowed away in the compartments under the seats -- she’d have had to request that specifically. Tricky woman.

The front door opens, and they don’t hear it. Ben’s hair is mussed from Hux pulling at it. Ben’s tongue is in his mouth. Ben is grinding up against him. Hux pulls back to nip at Ben’s full lower lip and could almost mistake the gasp for Ben’s or his own. Almost. He raises his head and turns toward the open drawing room door.

Rey stands there in her gray woolen coat over a deep blue dress. Gray hat cocked on her head, furry muff dangling on its string from one sleeve. Shoulders dusted with snow from the walk to the door. Hands trembling like white moths. On her face, pink from the cold: disbelief. The truth slowly, laboriously dawns on her. Her big hazel eyes stare at her cousin and her husband, at their state of undress. No jackets or cravats atop their vests, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow and collars unbuttoned. Not unusual in one’s own home, especially among bachelors alone, no ladies to impress. But coupled with their embrace, it paints a vividly debauched image. One could imagine Hux’s nimble fingers undoing Ben’s collar, tracing the skin exposed there in adoration.

The world upends. Hux hits the floor loudly, thrown off. Ben is strong enough to dump Hux’s full weight off his lap and stand up. Ben has the poker from the roaring hearth in one hand. He’s going to kill her. Here and now, and it can’t happen like this. It doesn’t happen like this. Rey utters a sound, at once a lost and angry sound, and instead of fleeing out the front door with tears freezing on her cheeks for all of Sorel to see, she whips around and pulls Brendol’s sword from the wall. It’s old, but sturdy, and Hux keeps it oiled and sharp.

Ben charges her, violence incarnate, but Rey is faster. She’s quick on her little feet. The sword slashes through the air in an unpracticed but determined swing, and Ben yells. It’s different than Hux has ever heard him yell before. It’s pure pain. Hux’s heart beats fast and cold at the sound of that cry. Ben is on the floor, big hands clapped to his face. Hux crawls to him, tears those hands away to see the damage. The cut bisects his lovely features at an angle from his brow down below the collar of his torn shirt. His white shirt is going red with blood, red like the velvet front of his vest.

The sword clatters to the floor. Even now Ben is struggling to rise. He won’t be down long, and it can’t happen like this. It doesn’t happen like this. Hux is up, one hand on Rey’s elbow, wrenching her down the hall and out the door into the snow.

“Go,” he says. His voice is not his own. It’s as hard as steel. “Damn you, _go!_ ”

There’s a red smear on the elbow of Rey’s coat, muddied and dulled by the cast of the wool. Ben’s blood, from Hux’s hand. She looks at him, her face unreadable. She is as unknowable to Hux as Ben is to his family. Ben cries out again raggedly, the sound echoing out into the silent winter day. Pain is losing ground to anger. He sounds more himself, and the sword is inside the house with him. Rey sees reason. She looks out the window at Hux as the sleigh scrapes away across the icy streets. If she tells her father what she saw, it might ruin everything. Ruin the element of surprise. But Hux thinks she won’t. He knows she won’t, for Ben’s sake if not Hux’s. Family is seared into Rey’s bones. They will repay her a thousandfold for that kindness.

  
  


Hux never hears Phasma come in, and then suddenly there she is, as though she can walk through walls, weightless. It shouldn’t be possible for someone her size. She’s taller than Ben, and just as broad. She runs her palm over his clothes when she lays them out, stroking them. It shouldn’t bother Hux, but it does somehow.

Everything bothers him of late.

“I’d like to dress like you,” Phasma says wistfully. She shirks dresses already in favor of trousers. She’s fondling the buttons on a vest.

“Ben’s would fit you,” Hux tells her. Probably they would.

Phasma sighs. Rekindles the fire, arranges the room. Her every movement is strange and disturbing to Hux. The air is stale in the house, impossible to breathe. Musty. It’s making Hux sick…. He thinks of his mother. He thinks of her unbidden. He cannot remember being haunted by her in this place so strongly as he is now.

Hux fixes his hair by the feel of it, ignoring the clouded mirror. Phasma sees, rushes to clean the glass for him. Hux draws back with a start until he cannot see the solid shadow of himself in the dirty mirror.

“No!” He snaps. “For God’s sake, leave it alone.”

Phasma looks at him like he’s insane. “The Docteur has to look himself right in the eye.”

She hasn’t touched the mirror, but it comes to life like a bubbling spring, smooth and clear, and turns with a creak so that Hux fills the shining oval. He looks into his mother’s eyes in his face and sees a viper’s soul and a lovesick heart, and a single thought fixed firmly in his head. Phasma is gone like a wisp of smoke. Ben stands in the doorway behind Hux, looking into the mirror, looking at Hux in the mirror. Two men side by side, tormenting each other by gentle candlelight. Two candles flicker on either side of the mirror.

Hux is wearing his jacket and coat over his green velvet vest.

“You’re not going out?” asks Ben.

“I said I would, Ben. I won’t be long.”

Ben’s wound is healing. It will scar over purple, and stay with him the rest of his days. It looks fearsome. A frightening mark on a dangerous man. “What do you care about a ball for?”

Hux doesn’t know what for, only he was invited and the house is suffocating him, and if he takes Ben along to the Sorel winter ball at Saint-Ours, that suffocation will follow. He knows what comes next, but he can’t bear to see it through. This scene is too much for him even now. The mirror blurs and someone blows out the candles. Someone cries out in pain, and the sound spreads through every inch of the room, filling the darkness, and then the cry shrinks down to the timid murmur of a confession, a broken voice saying, “Have your way then, you great brute, but not here. We’ll both go. Get dressed.”

“Ben Solo gave the Docteur a punch in the ribs before they left for the party. It doubled him over. I saw him there. Ben Solo told me to go away, but I refused to leave until the Docteur stood up again,” Phasma says on the stand.

  
  


There’s not a soul along the southern bank, from Sorel to Kamouraska, who fails to marvel at the black horse Ben rides, at his great endurance and matchless beauty. Ben and Hux share tender warmth riding the same saddle. They wouldn’t fit if Hux were any larger. They sit up straight, no sign of emotion on their faces as they trot by a long line of sleighs. Their breath puffs white, mingling and swirling in the air. There are other men arriving two astride on horses, but surely all bachelors. None of them married with wives waiting far away.

Hux wants to excite desire in Ben, but Ben’s anger will do just as well. It’s awful, how suddenly it can explode. Hux leans forward to whisper in Ben’s ear over the collar of his coat.

“I’ll have another lovely bruise from you. Will it be a rose or a cluster of violets? Such pretty gifts, Monsieur Solo. I think I’ll keep them to myself. You won’t lay eyes on me until they’ve faded.”

Hux can’t see Ben’s face, but knows he’s thinned his lips, he’s going pink in shame. Ben never blames himself without blaming everyone else for his failings, too. Especially Hux. Hux would like to soothe his temper, apologize for this little indignation, if only to also hold that power over Ben. Hux’s heart pounds, the pain of the spat leaving him, replaced by heady excitement. He and Ben are joined together, for better or worse. Bound by ferocious passion.

Ben surprises him by spurring the horse forward in a mad dash, leaving the sleigh-line for Saint-Ours behind and almost toppling one of them. The sleigh-driver shouts after them, outraged. Trees whip by, the horse galloping. Hux pleads with Ben to make the beast slow down, but his voice is lost to the wind. He holds on tight, locking his arms around Ben’s chest and then ducking his face into the back of Ben’s coat, terrified by their speed through the bumpy snow of the forest. The horse will break a leg and throw them both, or crush their bones beneath its body, and they’ll be killed or hurt gravely.

After a moment and an eternity, Ben slows the horse, and the frantic ride stops. Hux is caught up in the darkness. No sound but the horse, snorting his displeasure. Ben dismounts smoothly and pulls Hux after him, throwing him down in the snow. Snow down the back of his neck. Ben ties the horse to a tree and tosses one of the blankets in his pack over it. Then comes toward Hux.

Without a word, he takes Hux into his arms and they go rolling. Rolling in the snow down a steep embankment toward the black ice of the river, still too thin to walk on. They rest on the flat white space of the shore. It’s undignified. They look like overgrown children all covered in snow. There’s snow in Hux’s hair, in his ears. His mouth is full of snow. Ben’s icy face is against his. His lips thaw Hux’s.

Breathless, from cold and incredulous laughter. Hux can’t remember the last time he laughed without sounding half-mad. He sounds happy, now. He is happy. Ben’s hands are icicles invading his clothing, pulling his shirt out of his trousers to get a hand up under it. He’ll tear something. Hux shrieks, tries to wiggle away, can’t. He’s stuck under Ben’s weight. Pinned.

“I love you more than anything else on earth,” Ben says, growling it into Hux’s pink ear. His hand is cold on the tender place where Hux’s bruise is forming, the thumb rubbing circles.

“You’re my very life,” Hux says. They embrace. They kiss. Ben, mercifully, sets Hux’s clothes right enough to keep the chill out.

They lie in the snow for a long time, on their backs side by side, looking up at the night sky. At the icy cut-glass stars, and at the darkness between them. They shiver with the cold. Hux tries to keep his teeth from chattering.

  
  


Hux struggles out of his coat and furiously straightens his clothes by the coatroom, and then just stands there, not daring to move. Ben shrugs out of his languidly, not bothering to smooth his wrinkled red vest. Takes Hux by the arm, tells him not to be afraid, his voice low, his breath hot on Hux’s skin, leaning too close. Too close. Ben’s other hand is clenched into a fist.

Dancers and chaperones alike suddenly freeze. The room holds its breath. What a sight, there in the gilded doorway! Docteur Hux and young Monsieur Solo, both their faces red from the cold, standing there shivering with snow and wet spots all over their clothes. And their eyes fixed ahead, defiant. They have the look of bitter victory, of delirious joy on the brink of despair. Where is the good Docteur’s wife? Is it true these two stay on in Sorel by themselves? How curious.

Ben spirits Hux over to the fire, leading him with a hand on his arm as if Ben were the doctor and Hux the patient, or Ben the husband and Hux the wife. Ben protects him, guards him from the scathing looks of the room’s gossip mongers. Hux mustn't cringe or cower. Only blink as necessary. Just look right over the heads of the dancers, pretend to be looking at a certain spot on the wall. A prisoner. He’s a prisoner.

Hux half expects Luke to come in and brandish a pistol, shoot him square in the chest. Enough time has passed -- if Rey poured her heart out to her father, told him how horrifically Hux treats her, and then again how Hux has bewitched sensitive Ben…. No, there’s no point in miring himself in those thoughts. He’s falling. Hux must gaze at the wall, cling to it in his mind. He’s going down. The floor is slipping out from under him.

The guests at Saint-Ours go back to dancing, the untuned piano plinking far less prettily than when Ben plays. Hux comes back to life when Ben presses a hot drink in a crystal goblet into his hands. It smells of cinnamon. Hux sips it -- rich mulled wine, brewed with honey and orange peel and star anise.

“Where do you go? When you get that look,” Ben rumbles. He’s smiling faintly, but his golden-brown eyes are creased with worry. He’s leaning too close still. There’s hardly an inch of space between them, doubly noticeable as they stand in front of the ballroom’s roaring fire. Hux can’t bring himself to step back.

“I’m here. I haven’t gone anywhere. I’ll always be here,” Hux looks into Ben’s warm eyes and smiles back at him, relishing the way his response makes Ben’s grin widen. Ben is so beautiful when he smiles.

“I wish I could dance with you tonight, in this place. I wish we had the ballroom to ourselves.”

So Ben has the faintest bit of sense after all. Hux chuckles, drinking deeper, letting the warmth of the wine coat his throat and settle in his chest. “You can dance with me later.”

“Vertically?”

Hux slaps Ben’s arm lightly, where he’s resting it on the mantle. They stand, smiling at each other like idiots.

  
  


_I know I’m a sinner. I don’t deny it. But you, my dear Docteur, you’re damned to hell. Don’t wait for me. I’m going to drown myself -- it’s easy. I’ll break a hole in the ice of the river and jump in like a well. You’ll see me next spring, when the ice gives way and they can drag it._

_-Ben_

It’s a sham threat just like each and every time Ben has threatened before, but Hux can play the game. Mope around, waiting for a dead man to be laid in his arms, all cold and dripping. But he doesn’t call the police. No point in that -- this is a personal affair. It isn’t hard for Hux to mope. He’s come down with a fever after the ball, after that damned romp in the snow. He’s laid up on the couch, shivering. Phasma puts a heavy blanket over him and stokes the fire. He has an awful cough.

Hux closes his eyes. Traces Ben’s face and body in the darkness. He would know it by touch alone, mapping it with his hands the way blind people do, or with his lips. Each feature exact, a perfect likeness. Ben is stunning naked, huge beyond belief, muscular and strong. The shape of the ideal man, Hux’s ideal man.

“Armie, I’ve called a doctor.” Phasma’s voice.

“I _am_ a doctor,” Hux says hoarsely, not opening his eyes.

When a man has known all-consuming passion once in his life, total desire, he cannot go on living like everyone else. Eating, sleeping, strolling a pretty lane in mild weather. Those pleasures lose their flavor. He can’t be anywhere apart from the object of his passion without wishing that they were near, and so sours everything he touches with his hands alone.

Ben swears he’ll tear Rey limb from limb if she ever tries to come between him and Hux again. There’s a sun in the sky, that takes the path it should. A red orb that pretends it is the sun, copying the regular rhythm of day and night. In another world, far from here, life goes on.

Memory. A lantern dangling at arm’s length, swinging in a dark hall. The house at Kamouraska. The door closing behind Ben. The lantern approaches the white curtains hanging around Hux’s bed, the light orange and dead. A ghostlight. They have so little time to be together. Time runs out, thinning around them like air in a glass box with two birds shut up inside. A single word would be too much, would wrench them out of each other’s arms. They’ll suffocate together in their cage, or worse.

The bell sounds, ringing out their separation. The toll of the death knell. Hands grab them, accuse them, drag them out into the public square. They are handed over to the law in chains. A judge in a wig comes between them, forcing them apart, and then with a single stroke of the sword….

“I’ll die without you beside me to keep me warm,” Hux babbles. The room spins when he opens his eyes, lurching sickeningly.

Phasma’s voice. “Armie, it’s only a nightmare. Get hold of yourself….”

His vest and shirt, brusquely pulled open, over his tender white belly laying bare. Like a beast being skinned. Unfamiliar hands, palpating. A man’s voice, gruff. French, he’s speaking French. _Cela prendra du temps_. Hux mouths the words silently to himself. He’s let himself get out of practice, and that’s a shame. Time. It will take time. The doctor tells Phasma to keep Hux warm and fed, says he’s a bag of bones. Says it sternly. Fingers prod Hux’s yellowing bruises. The doctor says something else -- iron pills. Hux laughs, but it comes out a cough.

When Hux comes to, feeling grimy and weak, it is Ben who stands over him, looking rather wane himself. He kneels by the couch, clasps Hux’s clammy hand in both of his.

“I’m dying because of you,” Hux tells him sternly. Watches Ben’s eyes grow shiny, his lips tremble.

“Oh, don’t listen to him. He’s not,” Phasma scolds as she goes by the doorway. “But he could use a bath, if Monsieur Solo would like the honor.”

Hux soaks in the tub until the water loses enough heat that Ben demands he get out. He’d like to soak for an hour. “It’s still steaming,” he protests.

“You aren’t to get cold again,” says Ben firmly. Uses a cup to dump water over Hux’s head once more, rinsing soap bubbles down into the bath. “You’re nice and clean, like after confession.”

“It’s not me who has anything to confess. You write me that awful note and go off, and leave me here to suffer. I could hardly move, and all the while worried you went and drowned yourself.”

“Let’s make our peace once and for all, and let that be the end of it,” says Ben. He always offers this prize: peace once and for all. It’s never true. And making peace means something very specific to Ben, where Hux is concerned. He makes peace as violently as possible. At least it will be warm.

Hux stands and steps out of the tub, bracing himself on Ben. He lets Ben towel him off. He can stand, and that’s a start. He’s not shaking himself down to the floor.

They make their peace in the big bed in Hux’s old room where they’ve slept side by side since Rey left them here. Hux takes a passive role, just like he did at first in Kamouraska. Letting Ben taste him and touch him, hardly moving in response. Ben is deep inside him. He worked Hux open less gently than he could have. Ben’s movements are frenzied, an attack. He kisses Hux, throws his arms around him and squeezes him tight, prick pulsing deep. He moans loud when he comes, too loud, too loud.

Hux isn’t hard. He stiffens partway and loses it again, once, twice. Ben realizes it once the fog of his own pleasure leaves him. “You don’t love me,” he accuses.

“Ben, I’ve only just come back from the brink,” Hux says tiredly.

“We won’t ever be apart, will we?” Ben asks. Doesn’t ask, _you won’t leave me?_ Can’t even bring himself to vocalize that fear.

“We might,” Hux says truthfully. Can feel Ben’s mood darkening without looking at him. “The next time you run off over something stupid, you’ll come back and find me dead. Dead of fever or something else.”

“It wasn’t stupid.”

“Pray tell.”

“ _She_ wrote.”

Hux sits up, scowling down at Ben. “What did it say? Where’s the letter?”

“I burnt it,” Ben says obstinately.

“Ben!”

“You wrote her, didn’t you?” Ben growls. “Rey would have nothing to do with you otherwise. I know she wouldn’t.”

Hux had done just that thing -- outlined the events Rey had witnessed through the frame of Ben’s obsession. Ben pulled his Docteur into his lap just as Rey arrived, of course; he meant to shock her. To shock and dismay. It’s what Ben does. Hux sent her out for her protection. Ben is a terror, growing more willful as he misses the milestones of a man’s life, like marriage. He requires constant supervision, and Hux worries what might happen if Ben returns to Kamouraska, worries what aggressions the sight of Hux’s darling wife would bring out in him. Memory blurs the truth, for most. Rey would read the words, doubt her recollections, be assuaged, grow comfortable again and unsuspecting. Or so Hux had hoped. Now he would never know how well it had worked, if at all.

“She must be killed,” Hux says quietly, murmuring it like a sweet nothing. He hasn’t changed his mind on that matter.

“That’s between her and me,” Ben says with a strange look of bliss. Is it the thought of death that pleases him so? That transfigures him into something else? If Ben ever had any pity for anyone besides himself, it's rotted away now, dead beyond recall. “Everyone always liked her better. Luke, Mother, even our teachers. But not you. You swear it? Not you.”

“I wish I could erase forever that part of your being where I don’t exist,” says Hux. Erase the teachers and doctors that came before. It’s exactly the grand, sweeping romance that makes Ben soft and sweet, and it works now as well as ever. Ben snuggles him, pressing soft kisses against Hux’s jaw.

It’s impossible, of course, to return to the past. Each second tumbles out of reach like water running through open fingers, lost forever. Hux can no more alter Ben’s past than his own. The candle on the nightstand casts giant, languid shadows on the wall. Hux looks at the bridge of Ben’s nose, the dark flash in his eyes. Loves him, loves him.

“Do I have a murderer’s hands?”

Who asks? The poor dear wants to be reassured. Hux thinks it was Ben. He takes Ben’s big hands and kisses them, holds them to his face, palms warm. Ben’s dear, sweet, murderer’s hands. They lay together in bed. The curtains in Sorel are green with silver cord, but Hux pretends they are white. Pretends it’s a death shroud that wraps them together. Playing at death. They’ll be buried together, anything not a part of the two of them stripped away like moss scraped off a rock sentinel with a knife’s edge. A wife, a cousin…. Any link with the world must be destroyed. Their bodies, frozen together under black earth. Their hearts drained hollow. Their lips blue. Silence. Complete and utter emptiness.

Ben holds him close, and Hux’s blood moves again, surging through his veins. Coming back to life, cleansed by death. Purged of the world. There is nothing in him but desire like a flame.


	9. FOUR HUNDRED MILES

Great sheets of icy rain break against the windows. The sleet’s sharp smell mingles with the dusty stench of ink and paper. Ben sits at the black grand piano, playing softly. Hux sits pressed hip to hip beside him, turned the other way. He’s dragged a desk over, trying to write.

Phasma’s laughter from the hall. “Just look at the two of you! Kept inside like naughty children by the rain.”

Hux sighs and chews on the tip of his pen.

_ My darling wife, _

_ Your husband is writing-- _

_ \--you’ve blessed my life-- _

_ \--in the month of-- _

Hux looks at the backs of the fingers, the bare fingers on his left hand, counting. How long has it been? An eternity, and yet no time at all. Not enough time. He wants more.

_ \--janvier, we will return. I fear upsetting Ben’s nature by making the journey too soon. He is calming day by day-- _

_ My darling wife, your husband is writing, your loving husband is writing, your loving husband _

Copy it over one hundred times like boarding school penance. The countryside blows great sodden gray gusts against the house. The moaning of the wind and the bony tap of the rain on the windows’ glass encloses the town in a crystal circle. Hux doesn’t turn to look at Ben. He imagines him instead, forming the look on his face in his mind. This feels like an admission of defeat, this need to visualize Ben, as if he will ever need to call on that skill. They will never be apart. Ben plinks at the piano. Living. Here. His every movement is meant only for Hux.

The gutter needs fixed, the one on Rue du Parloir. Even living in Sorel, out in the wide country with all it’s rain and snow and sin, the waterspout clangs in Hux’s ear. And Kaydel, moving around in the next room, moving between bed and table. She shouldn’t make so much noise. Hux will cane her. At least he can’t hear Rose’s breathless gasps of pain.

“My darling wife, your loving husband is writing….”

Hux puts his pen down, leans his head on Ben’s shoulder. The piano notes stop, and Ben’s hand comes up to cup the back of Hux’s head. Hux winds his arm around Ben’s middle, squeezing him. Something scuttles by the door toward the kitchen. It’s a grave trespass, for any eyes to see this. They have no right. Hux wants to send the staff away, even Phasma, and live with Ben like two peasants. It would only make matters worse now.

In Québec, his wife’s every breath wafts death itself through the house on Rue du Parloir.

  
  


That wonderful black horse of Ben’s, with it’s flowing mane, hurtling across the landscape through the storm. It only obeys Ben, and so Hux can’t ride alone. Now that he’s recovered from his own illness -- and how novel that was, how he showed up to the ball dripping with snowmelt, without his wife, and his companion danced with no ladies at all -- Hux makes his rounds of Sorel at Ben’s back. They stay out late sometimes, only returning when their hands can bear no more of the cold.

Ben warms his hands up, rubbing them between his palms, rubbing life back into them. “Your nose is pink,” Ben says, and kisses Hux there, on the cold tip of his nose. His lips are warm.  _ Remember these nights. Remember this warmth, you will need it in the lightless room beneath the city _ , says a voice inside Hux. Not his own, for he will never be without Ben. There is no need to remember something you have.

It is not yet time for bed. Ben reads in the chair by the fire, one foot crossed over the opposite knee. Hux lays on the couch, feet up on the arm nearest the hearth, warming them. Hux thinks of his days in general practice, scouring the city through mild weather and tempests for ills to be cured, woes to be confessed. But what of the others, the monstrous, hopeless cases? Those so pocked with bleeding sores as to be unrecognizable, those with limbs mangled beyond saving and gangrenous rot already set in? Those with minds so shattered by the crushing pressure of life that they stare vacantly, would not react if the room burst into flames? Wouldn’t it be better to destroy them all, at once, and their ills along with them? Hux’s specialty, if he were willing. A slip of the morphine syringe, a dose too large, wiping out all creatures marked with suffering, sending their souls into the clearing at the end of the path. A killer is heaven’s gate.

But he doesn’t trust himself to hide the traces well enough. He clings to the concept of pity like it will save his soul. He pities them, these hopeless cases, and does as is expected of him, barred from offering them true relief. Forces himself to try and snatch a child from death, when the frail thing already has it’s toddling feet in the grave. His hands covered in pus and blood. See how grateful the stupid parents are, eyes shining with tears, hands clasped in prayer, weeping their thanks. Yes, they love the good Docteur come to their rescue. He does his best to make them love him.

Above the crowd of grateful patients’ faces stands Rey. She points her arm at Hux. Impostor. The crowd turns against him, shouting, jeering. Devil-man, the mark of the devil is on him! That red hair, those sharp eyes, sharp and cold as a knife. A witness steps forward, then a second and third and fourth. All of them testify under oath that Docteur Hux is in league with Satan.

“Some people are born to have their faces pushed into icy water,” Hux argues. “Get a firm grip and hold them down, and let death do the rest! It would be better to drown them as pups, the moment they’re born. They go easily then. When they grow into adults it’s terribly hard!”

The crowd jeers, points fingers at Hux.  _ Murderer! _

Hux bolts up where he lays, gets up from his nightmare. Ben starts. Hux doesn’t mean to startle him, but he does. “Only a dream,” Hux apologizes. Walks to him. Caresses Ben’s face. Leia was right -- Ben is a good boy. Hux could spend his life caressing Ben’s face, wiping it clean of evil and death. The chore would never run out, for it is also Hux that haunts and torments this man, just as Ben haunts and torments Hux. Ben says he’s going to kill Hux, some nights. Threatens it the way he threatens to kill himself. They’re only words, and words without conviction. Hux tells him that he’s sweet and good, and only does terrible things because he’s so unhappy. Ben has waited his whole life to hear it, clings to it, clings to Hux.

_ Let them point their fingers and accuse us, both of us bound together in a single fate against the world. Submerged together in the utter totality of love and death, taking it into our lungs. Justice -- the reign of blessed savagery restored, that’s what will save us _ .

“You’re mine, aren’t you? Mine and no one else’s?” Ben demands. “Say it.”

“Yours, no one else’s, I swear….”

Ben takes a breath. Stands, towering over Hux somehow in spite of their slight height difference. Ben unknots his cravat, unbuttons his vest. Hux’s eyes flick to the windows, uncovered. It’s snowing outside now, colder in the night, white building up at the bottom of the window panes. The curtains are open. The lamps are lit. Anyone could walk by, drive by in a sleigh and look into the drawing room. He can’t stand the light. Reaches for the lamp on the table, to blow it out.

Ben’s voice, giving orders. Giving orders is Hux’s purview, but here Ben is, his low baritone voice going rough and abrupt.

“Don’t touch the lamp. Take off your vest. Go on…. Take everything off. Faster.”

Hands trembling, Hux obeys. He can’t refuse Ben, not anymore. He stands there naked in the light. Ben stands naked beside him. Hux doesn’t look at the door, he knows he closed it. If he looks, Ben will fling it open in defiance. The room has a chill without his clothes on. Hux steps closer to the hearth, letting golden light flicker over his skin. Ben likes that, wolfish eyes devouring Hux.

“People can see us from the road,” says Ben.

Hux stands tall. Does not wither, does not look away from Ben’s gold-ringed eyes. “Isn’t that what you want?” Hux asks, voice mild and innocent.  _ What you’ve always wanted. You can’t stand pretending not to own me, body, heart, and soul. Are you happy, now? _

In all the town outside the house, who’s out there watching? Hiding in the darkness, spying. Ready to send the news flying off tomorrow at the crack of dawn. Straight to the judge in Montréal, and all the minds of Sorel, and beyond. Beyond Québec. All the way up the river to Kamouraska, reaching the seigneur in his estate, and his daughter. Hux’s wife, a condemned woman.

Hux puts hands on Ben, running palms over his chest and down his stomach, feeling the warmth of his skin. Watching the light of the fire throw shadows across his muscular frame. Ben pulls him down to the floor, a mercy. Out of the frame of the window. Ben’s weight, on top of Hux. Hux’s hands fisted in his hair, black as a beast’s. Ben’s cock against Hux’s, hard as a gun.

  
  


The sun is coming up. Hux dressed himself haphazardly to move to the bedroom, only to shed it all again. Ben walked the house nude, leaving his clothes in the drawing room for Phasma to find. Hux pulls himself out of Ben’s arms, out of their warm bed. The world is not yet barren, and yet he feels the coming bleakness in his heart. The worst thing that could happen -- to be doomed to live in a barren world.

_ Where are you, love? In what strange land? Away from me for so long…. _

Hux lives on Rue du Parloir. A doctor in the city of Québec. Honor means more to him than life itself. He works diligently, curing the ills of his neighbors. He provides such a beautiful home for his wife and children. He takes them out vacationing in the broad country each summer. He accompanies his wife out to the theatre to witness art, she in such fine dresses and golden jewelry and clutching his arm. He even leans down to kiss her under the guttering lamp light in the public street, bold as brass! They must be infatuated with each other. How could anyone suspect such a man of wrongdoing?

They stand together in the spring damp, awaiting their carriage before the sweeping marble steps of the Adélaïde. Rose’s hair is curled, but left flowing down her back. She doesn’t pin it up, she lets it tumble down like a black waterfall, black as raven’s down. The neckline of her gown is cut low, tops of her breasts on display like one of the starlets on the stage herself. She draws envious looks from the other wives on their husband’s arms. Rose’s husband cuts a cleaner figure than the rest, tall and slim and refined beside her. They’re as pretty as a painting. She’s pregnant, but they don’t yet know it.

“You received a letter yesterday,” she says.

Hux had: full of threats and pleas and filth and heartrending tenderness, signed  _ Kylo Ren _ . “Did I?”

“What’s happened to it? Was it important?”

“I don’t have it. I burnt it up. Some letters we have to burn.”

Rose nods sagely. “And some things we have to avoid if we don’t want to burn ourselves.”

“You mean hell, dear? Are you putting the fear of hell in me? You, so good to me?”

“Sometimes you forget your soul, Armie.”

She’s correct. Rose sees too much of him. He’s never fooled her for a moment. She’s no girl of nineteen, looking up into her new husband’s eyes and wishing to be happy. Rose is thirty-one, Hux thirty-seven, and she sees him. That, too, feels like a betrayal. To let her see him, let her  _ know _ him.

Hux heaves a sigh, looks down at his little wife indulgently. “It’s easy to forget one’s soul. So easy to leave it behind. Whatever would I do without you to remind me? To come after me waving it like an abandoned handkerchief?”

Hux’s soul will have to take strange paths to catch him, ducking through alleys in a mad dash. The need to be rid of his wife tires him. He’s lived it before, and knows the cost. Nevertheless, he wants to rub her out of his life forever, like a drawing erased from a sheet of paper. He knows the lines will not come up completely. They’ll linger, and ruin whatever he puts down next.

  
  


What a summer it was! Full of storms and dizzying heat. When the relentless sun shone down, the landscape seemed to shiver through a prism of water. The fragrance of the garden blooming behind the house on Rue du Parloir reached Hux even on the second floor, going to his head. Fraying his nerves. Cloying, it’s a cloying scent. Not sharp and clean like ice.

Kaydel stood in the doorway, her arms full of flowers. Hux looked at her blankly. The blooms smelled so strong.

“Just a couple is enough for the ceremony,” Hux said. “Don’t forget the candlesticks, and a crucifix.” His voice was thick as he explained they would need two cut-glass dishes, one with holy water and one with plain, a white towel for the priest to wash his hands. A twig to sprinkle the water with. Kaydel listened obediently, though she knew. Of course she knew all this. She asked for Hux’s keys, and Hux told her the location. She left.

The door was closed. Hux couldn’t call her back, tell her to close the shutters. Diminish the hell-light of the red room. Someone with a loud voice out in the corridor called that they would get Hux when it was time. Finn, Hux thought. It was Finn calling.

Hux lives somewhere else. A very specific place: a time in the past. A marvel no memory can accomplish. Hux’s real life is in the past. His escape from Rue du Parloir.

Both of them, lying in the bedroom. Midmorning. Far too late to sleep in. Phasma’s been in and stoked the fire, says nothing about Hux and Ben curled up together beneath the quilt, but gives Hux a sly look. Marvels at his madness. Admires it, maybe. She goes out, closing the door behind her.

Ben and Hux speak to each other between kisses, saying frightful things with the thoughtless freedom of the condemned. They whisper about Rey’s death. It seems so natural that they should, even as they move their bodies against one another. Sex, murder. Equally as violent. Killing Rey is merely the supreme extension of their love.

_ We should kill ourselves as well, both of us together. Be sure that neither one outlives the other, before the ordinary life of every day dulls our fervor for living and dying _ . A pretty lie -- Hux wants to live, to feel Ben’s hands on his skin for years to come.

“We’d better hurry,” says Hux. He couldn’t bring himself to send another letter, not without knowing what Rey had written back after the first.

“And we’ll be happy,” Ben says, half a question.

Hux looks at him in tenderness and terror. “We’ll be happy, yes.”

Rey Skywalker deserves to die. She’s asking to die, with her absence. She might have demanded Hux return with her to Kamouraska. She might have called the police on Ben. She’s done neither. There’s a death wish in her bones. Hux wants her to die, and Ben to live. Hux’s ambitions are life and death bound together, bittersweet. Never has Docteur Hux paid more attention to one of his patients or given them better care. Never has he been more sympathetic. Ben possesses a very special sadness that Hux knows well.

The fire is Hux’s idea. It’s untraceable -- houses go up in the winter, sometimes. A careless maid scattering coals on the floor too near the drapes. Once it starts it can’t be contained. A horrific tragedy, an entire household consumed in the dead of night. But no! How lucky, that the young seigneur-to-be and his charge wintered in Sorel.

Rey sits sulking in Kamouraska. Let her go up in flames with the estate. Houses can be rebuilt. The land will still be Hux’s. They’ll build a new manor in their image. A country refuge, private and safe. Ben can pick the pattern of walls. Anything but stark white. Their sins will be baptized in fire, the Skywalkers and Lady Organa sacrificed upon the altar of love, and Ben and Hux will rise from the ashes, loving and faithful. Sweet and pure.

They rise late, putter around the house doing meaningless things, thinking meaningful ones. They eat dinner. Ben puts away twice the food Hux does. Phasma pops a bottle of champagne at Hux’s request, smiling when he instructs her to pour herself a glass too.

Ben kisses Hux goodnight almost chastely, pulls the covers up. Hux says three words to him in a daze, almost sleeping already. Ben closed the curtains though the sky outside is dark, murmuring something about sleeping in again. Hux plunges into dreamless darkness. He wakes some time before morning, in a cold bed.

Runs down the stairs, checks the drawing room. No sign of Ben, and the sword’s off the wall. Hux doesn’t take the time to dress, runs out of the house into the freezing gloom before sunrise in only a nightshirt, hair loose and tangled from fitful sleep. This is earlier than they agreed. Damn Ben and his impatience.

Too late! He’s too late! He remembers, now, the way this goes. Remembers that he should have stopped Ben somehow.

The street is full of people. Incredible, all these people milling about before the sun rises. Someone says that his trial has begun. The witnesses look him over, his skinny body in its white cotton sheath, his mussed hair, his panicked face, his pale feet freezing on the cold ground. They seem to know him. It’s time to take his oath on the Bible.

“He’s the one that killed her, truly,” someone whispers. “He’s a criminal, that man. See how he dawdles in the street in the darkness.”

“I was coming home, between one and two in the morning,” says another. “All of a sudden I caught sight of Docteur Hux in his garden. He was wearing a sort of dressing gown. A white one, I think, but everything looks blue at that hour. Gave me a fright! I thought him a ghost.”

The horse is gone, galloping away on the horizon with its rider. Hux’s love, running far, far away. Across the border. He’ll never return to face the Queen’s justice. The charges are dropped, there won’t be trial, and all the witnesses can go home….

“You’re getting confused,” says Phasma from the door. “Nothing has happened yet. He’s only just now gone to Kamouraska.”

  
  


Every stable keeper along the river sings the praises of this horse, from Sorel to Kamouraska. His strength, his endurance, his dark, demonic beauty. Like the devil himself. Only Ben Solo is attuned to this beast. How perfectly the horse’s powerful stride echoes the frenzied rhythm of his master’s heart.

It is impossible to shake Hux’s last words off along the way, even through the wind and rain. They etch themselves deeper and deeper on his heart with each moment, despite the clamor of galloping hooves and the bite of wind on his face.

Hux held his hand in the warmth of their bed and whispered three words.

“Ben, save me.”

Not with prayers or alchemy. With his body, with living flesh. With his heart, his soul...the price is his soul. There’s a woman to be killed. There’s no other way. Hux is the entirety of love in the world. He is Ben’s very life. His needs are as absolute as death itself.

  
  


A murderer! Yes, these are a murderer’s hands, Ben. And Hux your accomplice, and Phasma beside him, thrashing in the trap. Hux makes Phasma sit with him on the drawing room floor beside the hearth, all the lamps snuffed out. Only the glow of the fire lights the room, making their shadows dance on the wall. They hold out their hands to the fire, Hux’s fingers so thin. Fine-boned.

Phasma asks if she can light her pipe. Sits smoking. “I’m dying to see what happens,” she says. “You and Ben.” Clicks her tongue. Phasma doesn’t make her predictions over newborns anymore, she only follows Hux. Does what he says. Watches him with a sort of infinite awe, like he’s something really interesting.

Hux puts his arms around her, and she embraces him as a friend. “You know he’s a wicked man,” Hux says. She knows. “He’s gone to Kamouraska and he’s taken the sword. He means to ruin it somehow.”

The rut in Hux’s heart runs deep like broken earth. The same devastation, and impossible to tell where it began by looking at it, but Hux knows. It started in Kamouraska, in that countryside. An infinitesimal shifting of ground somewhere in that landscape. When Ben watched him in the river. No, earlier. The hunt. His first sighting of Ben. Hux was already smitten, the future already spooled out into place, only waiting for him to walk along the path laid out before him.

One initial fault line, and then when the river floods… crumbling rock, rushing torrents. A corner of the known world gives way and falls to pieces, homes ripped apart board by creaking board and taken with it.

Did you not know such villainy was within you, Docteur Hux?

Hux is bound up now in the fate of this land, in the collapse of the estate in Kamouraska. The topsoil of pride, self-respect, and compassion are ripped away. His heart is stripped bare, left naked in front of the window for all to see. Beyond all saintliness, the innocence of madmen reigns.

Sitting by the fire with Phasma now, Hux wishes he’d sent her instead. Wishes he’d separated the deaths from Ben. In another world, Phasma is taking care of it. Hux and Ben will hear of the fire at the estate as though they had no part in it.

In this world, Hux opens a bottle of port. Pours for Phasma and himself. They drink too much of it, and Phasma gets out cakes too. She pokes at the fire, trying to find her thoughts in it, munching sweet cake absently. She sees something in the embers, drops the tongs with a cry and a horrible clatter. Makes Hux jump.

“What on earth is the matter?” Hux snaps.

“Madame Rey. He’ll cut her into ribbons. He’ll cut her down like an animal,” Phasma whispers, her face pale.

It’s not a surprising sentiment -- the sword is gone. It’s the way Phasma says it that chills Hux’s insides. Like she  _ knows _ . “You aren’t much of a witch,” Hux tells her. “Luke is better with the cards than you.” But Phasma knows when babies will die.

“When it comes to devils, no one’s better than you,” Phasma quips. “You put him in the center of it, knowing what a savage he is. Is this not what you intended? If you say so, Docteur, then I say I don’t believe it one bit.”

“While you’re rummaging around in those ashes, tell me if you hear any voices. Any screams. Can you hear my wife somewhere in there, among the coals?”

“Not yet, sir,” says Phasma.

They double over in a burst of hilarity. Who else would dare have such a hearty laugh over such a crime, planned out and enacted now, sooner than Hux thought. Who but the three of them? Ben is here too, in this room. He and Hux are the same.

Phasma lays her head in Hux’s lap, looks up at him with languorous blue eyes. Heaves a contented sigh. She’s wearing one of Ben’s vests. Hux can’t remember when she put it on. She looks like a handsome society man.

Rue du Parloir. Someone stirs in the next room, but Hux hears only Phasma’s voice. Sharp and clear, in another world. The real world. “This love affair of yours will be the death of us, Armie,” she says.

Worst of all is Rey’s silence. If only Ben hadn’t burned that letter.

  
  


Snow, as far as the eye can reach, like being lost at sea. Hux is at his post, the bedroom window. Rue Battre lays below, covered with white. Sleigh tracks gleam in the hardened snow. The shadows are very blue. The frosted trees creak and squeak in the wind. Hux stands by the window in Sorel, and waits for Rose’s gasps to quiet in Québec. He keeps his watch. Lifts the curtain. Runs a nail against the frost, fingertip coming away cold and damp like a corpse. Sorel to Kamouraska, Kamouraska to Sorel. Four hundred hard miles in winter. Deadly.

Hux’s life has run its course, and he can’t make the slightest change now. He won’t be spared a single grisly detail, here in his glass cage. Nothing to do but count the hours, the days until Ben returns. Paying careful attention to the time going by, trying to imagine what Ben is doing at each instant. Traveling by the river.

Hux wishes Phasma would try her trick on him. Give his face a lick and tell him whether he tastes of salt and death. Wishes more that he’d sent her instead, to take Ben’s place in Kamouraska. Wishes Ben hadn’t left him. If he’d waited until the date they planned, perhaps Hux would have realized his error and convinced Ben that Phasma should go.

A week. A week since Ben galloped off in the night. Hux stands by the window and thinks,  _ Only people who are really alive, like we are, deserve to live _ .

Another day, again at the window covered in frost. Trying to see two hundred miles to Kamouraska. Watching for the slightest sign of a black horse returning. Hux wishes he had said goodbye, before this windowpane was between them. Ben’s image, distorted by frost and distance and death, off to the ends of the earth.  _ Adieu mon amour, when you come back nothing will be the same _ .

Black on white. Black trees like skeleton hands reaching up over snow-covered fields. Black hair and brows and lashes and moles bordering white skin. Black horse. White snow pounded down under black hooves, all the way to the end of every road at once, where the horizon meets emptiness. To kill a woman at the end of all that emptiness. To kill a cousin, an uncle, a mother. Gallons of blood to shed in the white empty, in Hux’s name.

Hux wonders if Ben left the bells on his horse’s collar, not bothering to hide his approach like Rey hid hers. If the sound is spurring him gaily along toward his errand, ringing out silver joy on the northern country.

“Follow the plan,” Hux mutters to himself. Ben can’t hear it now.

Ben’s scent has vanished from Hux’s skin. It’s receding from Ben’s clothes. Hux curls up with his shirts at night, face buried in the cloth. When Hux closes his eyes he sees Ben on the estate, a strange mutation of man and beast.

“Do you think the weather up there is still all right?” Hux asks Phasma, fretting. “Do you think, the road...all those ravines piled high with snow….”

“It’s a damnable country. I can’t say.”

“Phasma, I’m so afraid.”

“You think I’m not, sir? I’m good and afraid.” Phasma embraces Hux nonetheless, no bitterness toward him. She was never very bitter about her fate. “That man of yours...that one’s the devil himself!”

  
  


Lobinère, Sainte-Croix, Saint-Nicolas, Pointe-Lévis…. Hux repeats the names to himself, pondering over each village in Ben’s path like the beads of a rosary. Ben hurtles headlong over snow covered roads. The deadly cold consumes him, works its way under his nails. Only a hint of cold like this once raised a fever in Hux, but Ben is strong of body. His will is unshakeable.

_ Let this scheme of mine weigh lightly on you, my love. Let it be easy to bear _ .

Ben is breathing frost instead of air. A winter storm blows over the roads and hides the trail. He battles gales of swirling snow. His lungs are on fire. He changes into someone else. Someone colder. What is Ben Solo doing by the mouth of the river? Has he managed yet to…?

Hux knows nothing about him. He lives in a void like a desert of snow. No use scanning the limitless expanse, stripped of its villages and people. The frozen river. No black horse on the horizon. This waiting is hell. Has Ben lost his way? Has he frozen to death, solid in the snow? Snow can seem so gentle, sending dreamlike visions up with its icy breath. Delirium, fatal fascination. The cold offers the solace of deathly calm. Hux hopes all Ben’s love and hate will keep him alive. That his gloved hands are not too numb to grip the reigns.

“We haven’t had a spell of cold like this in a long, long time.”

Hux whirls, startled, away from the window. It’s Poe, looking suspicious, looking worried. He’s asked after Ben more than once, about where on earth he’s gone to this time. Hux assures him each time that it’s another of Ben’s moody flights, that he’ll be back.

Hux goes to the tavern. It’s not his habit, but he’s dying for news. Listens in on the conversations. One cold day, as he sips mulled wine less rich than he sampled at Saint-Ours, he gets it.

The barkeep whispers about a stranger from Saint-Vallier, down in Sorel and staying at the inn. Stayed at the inn in Saint-Vallier too, and Hux had forgotten about Saint-Vallier right between Saint-Michel and Berthier. “About nine at night, a young man burst in. Not from those parts. Black hair, patchy whiskers. He stayed overnight and left the next morning. Strange air about him. He pulled off his woolen belt and threw it into the fire in the hall before anything else. Right in the fire.”

Hux wishes he could creep up behind his lover in the inn at Saint-Vallier, see the back of Ben’s neck as he stooped over to toss the wool into the hearth. Hux wishes he could have been beside Ben at every deed, witnessing his incredible strength. To raise his arm with Ben’s, to double him, to kill his wife with him.

Sorel to Kamouraska and back again in ten days. Four hundred miles, in the dead of winter, and without even a change of horse. The innkeepers gossip. The man flies like he’s running from wildfire.

Raw flesh, rotting corpse, blood, pus, bile, urine. Filth of every kind. Gangrenous decay, crushed bones, drowned beauties with wet hair plastered to their skin and eyes frozen agape and swollen bellies, babies deformed in birth, women raped, consumption, dysentery… Docteur Hux has seen all diseases and deaths, and none compare to the putrid horrors found in the mind.

Rey’s one task now is to wait for her murderer, making his way over miles to reach her. There in the cove at Kamouraska. The flash of steel.

Once past Saint-Anne the witnesses' stories start to multiply, Ben’s description flowing out of many mouths, striking like arrows into Hux’s flesh. A woman in a blue apron takes the stand, raises her hand up to swear honesty. An inn-keeper’s wife.

“I was really frightened, your honor. We’re poor people. We run a little inn. There’s nothing close by, no neighbors, you understand? It’s a good thirty miles just to the church in Kamouraska. It was janvier 31st at two in the afternoon. This stranger came along the road, headed down the river, so I stood in the door to watch him go by. Black horse, big as can be, and the man all in black too, with a black hood. It was cold, and his face was red. He was young. I went back in after he passed. It wasn’t until later that night...my husband will tell you the rest.” She whimpers, tears overflowing her eyes, nose running. She cannot go on.

_ I’ll wait forever,  _ Hux thinks.  _ I’ll wait my whole life for you to return to me from the cove in Kamouraska. Wash your blood-soaked hands and make your way back to me, triumph on your handsome face _ .

“Février 1st we saw him again, same man, same horse. Going right by our place. Young man, well-built. Black whiskers and face all ruddy from the snow. Black hood. My boy noticed his white teeth when he smiled at us. He said, ‘Pa, did you see how white those teeth were?’ and I didn’t like the look of the man’s smile at all. It reminded me of a wolf snapping.”

  
  


Docteur Armitage Hux, watching the past and playing his part. Here in Saint-Anne, at the inn. Not just another traveler, taken in and given a bed for the night. There’s a braided rug next to the bed. Toilet things on the table next to the pitcher and bowl. He needs to get to know the place before a certain stranger comes knocking. He doesn’t disturb a soul -- it seems no one can see him.

It is the middle of winter, just off the road between Saint-Anne and Kamouraska. The cracks in the windows of the inn are plugged with wadding. There is a two-decked stove standing in the hall which doubles at the inn kitchen. A drunken beggar is asleep on the bench by the stove, where the room is warmest. The travelers wear potato-colored blankets and dismal gray coats. It is a winter like any other in this godforsaken place.

Outside, there is a huge expanse of snow as far as the eye can see. A thick white mist rising from the fields, the road, the river. The wind blows up great gusts of snow that hide the road and trails. The thought of the cove in Kamouraska throbs its way through Hux’s head, carving him up like a sword.

The hall darkens. The fire is dying, coals glimmering through the slits in the stove door. The beggar lies on his back with his mouth open, respiring noisily.

Hux is waiting for the stranger in the black cloak to pound on the door with his big fist, asking for a place to stay the night. Hux wants to hear his voice, unlike any other. To be turned inside out by the sound of that voice, to be shaken and ripped apart by the roughness it will have after the night’s wicked doings...Hux will wait for that voice his whole life in vain.

To see Ben’s face, his body bundled up in winter clothes. Hux wants to follow him unseen to his room and watch him strip bare. Hux will strip beside him, stand naked at his side, reaching through layers and layers of time and disaster. The past, leaped over in one desperate bound! Murder and madness reduced to a lesser weight, no longer bigger than life. No longer deformed by panic and anguish. Brendol’s sword, shining and undefiled. Spotless and polished after the battle.

Love and freedom bought at their terrible blood-price, those dark and gleaming coins piled on the chair by the bed along with their clothes, neatly folded. Hux will fold Ben’s for him -- Ben never took to it. There’s a fine, big bed in the room for the two of them. A room to themselves all night long. Hux wants to see Ben looking up at him from between his thighs. To take Ben inside him, deep inside. He wants to scream Ben’s name when he comes. No one here will hear him. Hux is a ghost in this place, for he was never here at all.

Hux is dragged back all at once to the court. It rushes to meet him, skimming close like a raft on the river as he stands in place. The beggar, his rheumy eyes wandering. “I was on my way to the inn, over by the cove at Kamouraska, and I saw this stranger. He seemed lost so I went near. It’s awful bad when the snows come down so hard, and I couldn’t just leave the poor fellow there. He asked me which way to the shore. Couldn’t tell anymore whether he was on ice or land, him and his horse, and the snow blowing all around us. I pointed him the way and he gave me a dollar. I didn’t get a good look at his face. He was all bundled up and it was dark, see?”

Hux sees the cove clearly. It fills the inn where he stands. He pities Ben, helpless and lost in the dead of night, in the cold and blowing snow, and just having killed a woman. The horror, the agony of it, and for such a sweet man….

Hux stands watch at the inn, studying the knots in the wooden floor. He hates finding himself in these places as they were described, not knowing with certainty that the witnesses told true. A knock at the door. Hux curses the innkeeper and his wife, leaving Ben out knocking as long as they do. Hux’s lover is cold, standing alone in the frost. They must let him in. Hux can’t open the door. He closes a hand around the knob and it won’t turn, won’t even rattle.

The innkeeper appears at last, lit candle in hand. He stops at the door and asks who it is. Hux could just gut the stupid man for making Ben wait. There’s no answer in words, but Ben knocks again. The innkeeper asks, a second time, who is knocking at the door. The inn is shut up for the night.

Ben’s low voice, muffled through the door yet still electrifying Hux’s every nerve: “A friend.”

The innkeeper lifts the bolt. The door swings open, and….

Hux feels tears prick his eyes. It’s Ben, his Ben, pink-faced from the cold just as the witnesses say, windblown and snow covered and frustrated, but alive and well. He has a beard, a few days of growth. It’s hardly more than a mustache and goatee. His cheeks don’t fill in well. His scrappy beard is covered in frost. His breath is quick and throaty, and he smells of sweat and wet wool.

“A place for me and my horse,” Ben pants. “And hot water. Lots of hot water.”

Hux sees that a good deal of the ice caked on Ben’s black clothes is darker than it should be. It could be a trick of the candlelight, if one wasn’t looking for it. Hux delights in Ben, delights in the look and smell of him. A murderer’s smell. Beneath sweat and wool; the iron-sharp scent of blood. Ben’s scent, the scent of the beast.

The innkeeper fires up the stove to meet the request, filling the coffeepot with water and putting it on the fire. Ben snaps at him harshly, says he’ll need a lot more than that. The innkeeper wordlessly puts on a pot, too.

“You didn’t get that filthy on the roads did you? With all the fresh white snow.”

“The last place I stopped was a slaughterhouse,” Ben says truthfully.

The innkeeper raises his eyebrows, recognizing the dark ice for what it is at last. “They didn’t let you wash up there?”

“I was in a hurry….” Ben moves the conversation on quickly, handing the innkeeper coin to put the horse in the stable and give it water and oats.

The innkeeper takes the stand before the judges. “I did as he said, fed and watered his animal. The saddle had these drips on it, these frozen drips of red from his riding, and I scratched some of them off with my nail. I was scared, but not until later when I thought it over. When I went back in he had taken the hot water and gone up to his room. He got in the closet by the stairs and took two extra blankets too, left payment for them on the counter. When you’re out a long time in the night in a storm like that, you get so cold it seems impossible to warm back up. Reckon he wanted them because o’ that.”

Hux enters Ben’s room with him, standing there, invisible and unheard. He doesn’t try to touch Ben, because it will crack his heart in two to discover he can’t. Ben is racked by terrible shudders, shivering from head to toe, his white teeth chattering. His breath rattles in his chest. Hux wants dearly to wet a rag and clean Ben’s face for him.

_ Bourbonnais. My love is calling to me from across the border, across the world. I will go soon. I will go to him _ .

Ben cleans himself with the water, pouring it on his clothes in the tub to thaw them. The water goes pink and then red and then deepest wine, so thick and dark that Ben’s black clothing is lost in the murk. His body is stained. He rubs at it, getting red froth on the walls and floor. He dumps water over his head and it runs down his naked body in red rivulets. He stains the bowl, leaves bloody handprints on the kettle and pot. The more he scrubs the more the blood multiplies, as if he is generating it with his movements. The smell of it permeates the air.

Ben is trembling, trembling, trying to wash himself clean and dirtying the room instead. He wrings his clothes out and hangs them up to dry. They drip red. When finally he climbs into bed he leaves blood on the bedframe and sheets and all three blankets. He shivers there, so violently it makes the bed shake. Hux lays next to him, unfelt, not dipping the mattress, and gazes into the face of the man he loves.

In the morning Ben takes no breakfast except for a full glass of gin.

The innkeeper’s wife takes the stand. “When I got up it was first light. The girl who helps me clean the rooms was knocking on my door so fast I didn’t know what the sound was. I opened it and she kept knocking on the air, her eyes all vacant and scared. I says ‘what is it?’ and she takes me up to the man’s room. The man who came late the night before and left early. There was blood on the floor, blood all over. The walls, the bowl, the bed. There were even drops stuck up on the ceiling. It was crusted in the bottom of the tub, the whole place smelling bad enough to make you puke. I says, ‘he’s killed someone!’ and my girl says it too. I went to my husband and told him ‘it’s plain that man’s killed someone.’ His eyes were real suspicious, too. He never looked us in the eye the whole time he was in the house. I had to throw away the quilts.”

  
  


The wind dies down. The gusts of snow in the cove at Kamouraska stop blowing. A traveler speeds along the river, pushing his black horse to the limits of its strength, riding away from Kamouraska. Finished with Kamouraska, but not with urgency. There’s a new fire in his belly: the desire to return to his love. The reins are spotted with blood. Something must be done about all this blood, eventually, but it seems unimportant next to returning to Hux.

Everything is meaningless except for the path ahead to Sorel, to Hux. The furious passion of murder, too, is diminished now. A dagger pulled from a heart, leaving behind only a nice, neat wound. In Ben’s heart, ecstasy. A victor’s exultation. He goes now to the ginger-haired doctor on Rue Battre, to deliver the joyous news that he is a widower, finally free.

Ben’s head is spinning. His horse can hardly make it through the soft, new snowfall. Since yesterday, long before the cove at Kamouraska, Ben has eaten nothing. The fleeting warmth of the gin is gone. Hux rides with him, unfelt on the saddle behind Ben, invisible arms locked around his chest. Haunting Ben, as Ben haunts him.

_ We’re out of our minds together, the two of us. Are you my patient, or am I yours? You’ve taught me much, Ben _ .

The illusion of happiness rises before them like a fogbank on the frozen road. To live together, the two of them. Loving each other tenderly, uninterrupted. Two blue shadows on fresh snow. Beside and inside each other, closer than two men are meant to be. Surpassing possibility. Two Gods.

  
  


In the numbing winter cold, a farmer rides by the cove in Kamouraska on his dappled gray old mare, dreaming idly as snowflakes graze his face. He doesn’t try to brush them off. The sun is up, and the snow melts when it touches him. In the clear light of day, the cold is not so deadly. There was tumult at the inn when he passed it, and he stopped to see if he could help. Heard a wild tale about bloodstains, and a stranger headed the opposite way down the river. The farmer thinks about getting home, and how nice it will be to get his boots off and warm his feet by the fire.

Why go running after nightmares? He declined a look in the inn. He looks now at the snow in front of him, the blinding and honest snow. The farmer glances left and then whips his head back for a second look, wide-eyed. There, the cove, and within it blood on the snow. Lots of blood, frozen solid and vividly red in the sun. Patches of it at odd intervals. The farmer crosses himself and urges his mare on.

The farmer finds his terrible prize: an arm sticking out of a mound of snow and ice. He chips away at the hard sparkling snow with the tools in his pack, uncovering darker and darker layers of red and then finally young Rey Skywalker, hacked to bits and disfigured, missing her eyes.

“Oh God,” the farmer says. “Oh  _ God _ .”

Rides straightaway to the Skywalker estate and finds it smoldering. Rides into town, fit to beat the devil, his eyes nearly popping out of his head, irises ringed on all sides by panicked whites. Screams for help. Screams there’s been a  _ murder _ .

The shrill bells of the church in Kamouraska where Docteur Hux attended mass with Rey Skywalker before absconding for Sorel peal out their death knell over the cove’s expanse. The sound spreads on the wind, far and wide through the blue and frosty air.

Rey is brought inside the home of her mother’s dearest friend, another landowner named Lando Calrissian. She thaws there, and is examined. The doctors determine her wounds caused by a sword. The death rites are read to the corpse before it is interred below the family pew where Hux once sat with Rey’s gloved hand in his and Ben’s knee brushing against him.

_ Sancta Lucia, Saint Agnes, et Saint Cecilia! _ A soothing litany of sounds. Hux wants to clap his hands over his ears, but doesn’t bother. He’s not here in this place, no more solid than he was in the inn. He did not come back to Kamouraska to see Rey into the ground. His wife’s last rites will worm their way into his brain whether he covers his ears or not. But that voice…. Thank God! It’s Kaydel, Kaydel’s voice, and the rites are happening in the house on Rue du Parloir. Hux is in his own house. He tries to sit up, to jump up and run to Rose’s side, but cannot.

Hux can see the corpse in the snow as clearly as if it were his own memory. Ben stands over it, striking it over and over with superhuman strength let loose and wild. Destroying her. The conqueror stops for a moment and wipes his face on his sleeve. Searches his heart and finds it untroubled. Yearns to have Hux here and now, and possess him in sight of the dead. To take his body in triumph, before the drunken frenzy cools.

The innkeepers start to wag their tongues. At Riviere-Ouelle Ben asked to have his reins cleaned and the stable boy’s rags came away red. Each place he stays, he leaves the water ruddy in the basin. He takes food, finally, but also gin or brandy. He asks for a full glass and drinks it all.

The news reaches Québec, and the wheels of justice begin to turn. A warrant is written up. Ben’s horse trudges through the snow, a lumbering plod where he ought to be flying. It’s hooves mire the snow and leave tracks filled with hard gray ice.

_ I’m waiting, Ben, watching for you with the prayers for the dying pounding in my ears _ . Trying to call Hux back to Rue du Parloir.

_ Miserere nobis, for behold, I was conceived in iniquities, and in sins did my mother conceive me _ . Then Kaydel’s voice. She says she will go and make some strong black coffee to bring Monsieur around.

_ No! Not when my love is on his way back _ …. Whatever else, do not leave the darkness now. Not now. Just to see him again…. The amazing things Ben has done, and he’s done them for Hux. Hux needs to be there on Rue Battre when Ben arrives, be there to welcome Ben Solo home with all the thanks and tenderness he deserves. Jump into his arms, wraps legs around his hips so that he has to take hold to keep Hux lifted. Breathe deep the smell of blood and death still clinging to Ben’s skin.

The fevered dreams endeavor to keep him. A voice he knows better than any other in the world, begging him to stay and see it out to the end. Ben’s voice.

“Listen to me, Hux. I had to be sure. She got out of the house and I had to be sure she would die, that it would be over. So I made sure. I made sure, do you hear me? I swear!”

No need to swear. Hux believes him. “Good God, Ben, your face. Oh, love.” Ben’s lips are cracked, pulled taut over a smile that could never be called one. It’s a snarl. He looks tired. Weary. It was a hard ride. Hux is in his arms, pressing palms to Ben’s cold face, kissing him so furiously that Ben’s voice is muffled.

“It’s done. Now you’re free...we’re free, the two of us….”

Phasma, muttering: “Monsieur looks so different. Really, Armie, he’s awful to look at. Wicked as a plague.”

Hux thinks he’s stunning. Ben paces in the bedroom after he’s been bathed, bathed patiently and adoringly by Hux. Has he picked up the habit from Hux, this pacing? Ben goes to the curtain, lifts it, looks out. His body is a shadow against the light of day. The massive outline of his shoulders blocking the path of the sun into the room. His head is bent low, hair obscuring his eyes. He tells his story in precise detail, letting Hux bear the weight of it with him.

“I swear it’s not human. All that blood in one body. It was dark magic.” Ben turns, and Hux stares into his eyes. They are just as warm as Hux remembers, brown ringed with gold. They haven’t gone cold or blank like an executioner’s. Hux goes to him, puts hands on him. They look into each other’s eyes and scent each other like animals meeting again after an age. “Am I monstrous to you?” Ben asks.

It’s ludicrous, unthinkable. The plan was Hux’s. Ben may have escalated it --  _ ruined it, he’s ruined it _ \-- but Hux made him kill. “You need a shave,” Hux says.

Ben laughs. They don’t cry. Neither one of them sheds a tear. Ben allows Hux to shave his face before he takes him into bed. They cling like drowning men, doomed for their refusal to let go. Hux pushes Ben beneath him and Ben goes willingly, his eyes dark and wide in shock. Hux takes the lead, tonight. Hux runs hands over Ben’s stomach, his hips. Kisses the smooth skin, bites it until Ben is gasping.

Hux guides one of Ben’s legs up onto his shoulder to push slicked fingers into him. Ben is grinning -- the flickering lamp light makes his teeth gleam like porcelain. They look sharp; his pointed canines look sharp. Hux watches Ben’s face as he steadily works him open, devouring each miniscule change in his expression, unconsciously mirroring them himself. Finds the place within that makes Ben gasp.

“Hux,” Ben says, then, “ _ Hux _ .” With Hux leading, he won’t last long -- this is everything he’s ever wanted, everything Hux has denied him, and he wants it all before the end.

Hux sinks into him. Ben grabs his hair, pulling him down for sloppy and distracted kisses, moaning into his mouth. Hux’s hips meet Ben’s and Ben’s back arches. Hux gives him a moment, and then realizes he needed it too. An instant of silence and stillness to hold later in adulation, running worshipful fingertips over its gilded edges. A treasure stored in the memory box of Hux’s heart. Looking down into Ben’s eyes, Hux starts to move, fucking him into the sheets until those eyes close in ecstasy.


	10. PRISON

The policiers from Kamouraska and Québec converge on Sorel, meet with the authorities there. On février 7th, two appear at the house on Rue Battre with a warrant for the arrest of Ben Solo. Too late! It’s too late.

Kaydel tried to bring Hux back to consciousness. She tugged at his wrist as hard as she could, grunted some choice words for the doctors in the master bedroom. She held up the tube of smelling salts they gave her, wafting them under Hux’s nose, but nothing worked.

Hux won’t let the life and death on Rue du Parloir come near him. He clings to the darkness, feeling his way through it as if he were blind. Two arms reaching out in front of him, searching for a friendly hand. Ben’s hand. He finds the cold side of the bed instead, Ben gone just as before, this time not to return. He sells the black horse, exchanges it for another. The  _ policiers _ , right on his trail.

_ Why did you leave in the night? How could you think I would be safe without you? Or did you care at all? _

The scent of coffee pervades the house in Sorel, transported from Québec. Kaydel’s coffee. Hux doesn’t want anything to do with Rue du Parloir. Not yet. If he can only catch up to Ben….

Hux dreams that he is getting married again. In the winter snow instead of summer heat. He has to pass under a gray stone archway encased in ice like glass, the devil on his arm, escorting him. His proud father, crowned with antlers black as pitch. The guests’ heads are covered by swarms of bees, crawling in and out of their open mouths, over the surface of their blind and open eyes.

Phasma laughs, says it’s about time Hux looked his love in the face.

Ben waits at the altar in a suit of pure black. Black shirt, black vest…. His face is so lovely Hux has to close his eyes, for fear his heart will simply stop. He opens them again and Ben is gone. Hux whirls, looking at the deserted altar, the empty chairs, the snowy waste around him. When he turns back to the altar the ice there is stained red with frozen blood.

When Hux wakes to an empty bed he begs Phasma to come with him, over the border and far away. But first to Montréal, to speak with lawyers, a foolish errand. Their undoing. Off again, toward the border. Ben was chased to the border. But how to find him? Where to look? Somewhere in the vast depth of another country, Ben is lost. Hux is lost. Hux and Phasma, they’re being followed. Don’t worry about a thing, Hux. Don’t worry about finding Ben. You won’t get that far.

Lundi, the eleventh. The widower Hux is arrested and taken to prison in Montréal. Phasma sits in prison beside him. None of Hux’s patients try to defend his honor, their gratitude running out quickly once their petty problems are fixed, the good Docteur left to fend for himself against an onslaught of accusations.

He tosses and turns on his cot in his lightless room. The shackles are chained to the wall, the length inadequate. He lays on the edge of his cot, unable to roll further onto it. It’s bolted to the floor. He can’t drag it forward to rest more comfortably. He shivers in the cold, in his filthy shirt and trousers with no coat or shoes. A taste of iron wells up in his throat. He spits up blood. The warden doesn’t pull his punches.

Released for reasons of health, the sallow-faced Docteur walks through the prison gate as if sleeping upright. The warden shakes his hand before he goes, as if it were all just a dreadful mistake.

_In a while you’ll leave Canada, won’t you?_ _As soon as you can. That’s all I ask. I ache for you_.

_ -Kylo Ren _

In prison Hux feared being left behind, deserted. He published his address in the paper first thing after returning to Québec, a business advertisement but also a plea in the dark, and eventually the letters came. They contained no apology.

  
  


The coffee is thick like syrup on Hux’s tongue. It leaves a bitter taste in his mouth that he can’t swallow. He can see himself in the mirror from his chair. His eyes are tired, ringed by dark shadows. Kaydel kneels in front of him to speak, her voice and face gentle.

“The priest wants to tell you good-bye before he leaves.”

Hux turns wordlessly toward the priest.  _ I should have taken my stand before. Gone with Ben to Kamouraska, or ran to the border the moment I left prison. I should have just let them try to drag me back again. Utter and complete exile would have been better than the half-life I’ve lived these last six years _ .

And what if Ben is in Bourbonnais, waiting for a letter back that he never receives? If Hux could find him alive there, he’d fling himself into Ben’s arms. Together for life, the two of them. Hux and...well, Hux and Kylo Ren. Could he still be there? Still alive? Married? No, Hux would sooner see him dead at his feet than married. Hux could laugh at that thought -- he’s not too proud to admit his hypocrisy.

Rose Tico lays propped up against a pile of pillows. The smell of candle wax floats through the darkened bedroom. The shutters are half-closed. A faint smile rests on Rose’s lips. “I’ve had the last rights. The Lord has cleansed me of all sin,” she whispers, still smiling. Hux wipes a tear from her cheek, kisses her there, and then her unfeeling lips.

“Forgive me,” Hux says, his voice thick. Rose nods. She knows. She knows him better than he does, and Hux forgives her for it. Forgiveness is too great a burden for one person. Hux knows now that it takes two: the betrayed and the betrayer. Forgiveness is like falling in love, and Hux can no more control forgiveness than love. It echoes between himself and his wife. He wonders whether he’ll find it with Kylo, too.

“The children,” Rose says again, meaningfully. It is as if, in the moment of death, they are connected by a silver thread between minds.

“Yes,” says Hux, making a decision he hadn’t known awaited him. “I swear it.”

Then the nightmare breaks against Hux again. Here in this room on Rue du Parloir, everything is calm. The model husband, clasping his wife’s hand in his. And yet, off in a parched field up north, under the rock foundation of the burnt-out shell of an estate, they’ve dug up a man with pallid skin and red hair, still alive. Buried there long ago in some far-off, savage time. Preserved. They’ve gone and let him loose on the town, and all the people have locked themselves in, so deathly afraid of this man. He must have an awful lust for life, buried alive so long. He is a hunger growing inside the earth for centuries, unlike any other that has ever been known. He is hungry and alone.

“I swear,” he says, speaking it in the exact same tone he once used to say,  _ deliver us from evil _ . Hux clutches his wife’s hand. One of the doctors leans down, whispers in his ear. Hux’s face goes white.

Kaydel whispers to Finn, “He’s a sour man, but just look at how Monsieur loves Madame. See how he’s crying….”


	11. EPILOGUE

Spring.

The sun reaches the bench on the porch early, sketching out a play of pink light and purple shadow that Hux knows as well as the voice of the man he loves. There’s a stream at the edge of the property. Through the branches of the trees Hux can make out the burbling waters, constantly shifting colors. The birds sing a hymn to the sun, and Hux accepts it as meant for him instead, allowing himself the arrogance.

Raindrops left over from the night glint like diamonds on the green leaves and blades of grass. As the sun rises, its beams shine down in shifting rays. Hux can name most of the plants. Kylo teaches him the names -- some are plants he knew, but others are fresh to him. Rib grass, sedge, wild sorrel. There is no eelgrass in the stream, no green rushes, and the water is so clear over warm stones that it looks more gold than silver. Kylo’s eyes are imprinted on this place instead of Hux’s. Hux likes it better that way.

Bourbonnais was trapper’s country ten years ago, but beaver are dwindling now. There is always work for a doctor, though Hux has stepped back into the role of a sawbones. The settlers here are French-Canadian, but they’ve adapted an American view toward psychiatry, and wouldn’t waste their coin on it if they did believe. Americans, it seems, at least those outside of sprawling east coast townships, distrust doctors of the mind. Kylo still has work -- by simple good fortune he took up a blacksmithing apprenticeship instead of fur trading; the old graying blacksmith was in want of help around the shop and Kylo appeared from the forest to his doorstep, asking directions to the next nearest town and plainly strong as an ox. The man had offered work and Kylo stayed, though Illinois still seems perilously close to Canada. They talk of moving sometimes, Kylo and Hux. Further south. There are other Acadian settlements in Louisiana. Perhaps they will. Time unravels its glittering cord in front of them, theirs for the taking.

There has been no word from Québec, where last Hux knew, Rose was close to full recovery. The words the doctor had murmured to him --  _ she rallied after the rites _ . Rose continued to rally. Pink returned to her complexion, and her eyes lost their fever-brightness. She sat up, then stood up. The night after she managed the stairs on her own, Hux left with only a few of his belongings, his ring sitting on the side table atop a notice that his estate and funds were hereby transferred to Finn Harry. Unorthodox, yes, for a wealthy Docteur to surrender his worldly possessions to the household governor, but it would be grudgingly allowed given Hux’s sudden disappearance. In the absence of an adult male relation. And Finn would care for Rose and the children. Hux was confident of that.

_ So I’ve kept my promise, you see? _

A new shadow in the chill of the morning air, a blanket settling on Hux’s shoulders. Kylo treated him like he was made of glass where any measure of cold was concerned, nevermind they both hailed from further north than this. Nevermind it was a lovely spring. Hux is convinced that getting him away from winter’s grasp is at least half Kylo’s motivation in suggesting they move. A steaming mug of coffee is pressed into Hux’s hands, Kylo's fingers brushing his.

Warm breath just under the edge of his jaw, sans the tickle of whiskers. Hux insisted that Kylo shave -- he’d looked the part of a forest dweller when Hux arrived. Kylo does it regularly now, just as he did before. Before. Kylo’s plush lips brush up the side of his face, over his sideburn to his brow. Kiss there. Hux closes his eyes, letting Kylo kiss the delicate skin of his eyelid too. Then down again, a kiss on his cheek, the corner of his mouth.

Hux turns his face, kissing Kylo’s lips softly. Slow and deliberate. When he pulls back he opens his eyes, and can’t help smiling. “Thank you,” he raises the coffee cup slightly, indicating it, and then drinks.

“Roof of the shed needs repaired,” Kylo says, sitting beside Hux. Closer than what’s proper. There’s no one out here to see. Ben’s little stone house is deep in the woods. “Thought I’d work in the garden too.”

“Mm. That’s why you didn’t open the shop?”

Kylo’s golden brown eyes, flicking over to Hux’s, amused. A smirk on his mouth. “Not the only reason. Have you got house calls today?”

“I can’t say I have. I thought I’d stop by the Rolland farm later, check in on their little girl. The one with the eye infection, you remember? But they haven’t sent for me.”

Kylo’s big hand clasps Hux’s knee, a warm weight there. The yard is bursting with new life, dappled shadows rolling over the grass and the stone path Kylo put into the earth. Millicent darts through the garden, chasing something only she can see, her orange coat winding through greenery and fragile spring flowers.

_ You replaced me with a cat? _ Hux remembers teasing when Kylo first beckoned him inside, already misty-eyed, and the little feline jumped up in Hux’s lap.

_ There’s room for another impertinent ginger, if you’ve a mind to stay, _ Kylo bit back at him, any insult stripped from the words by the fat tears rolling down his face and the wide smile frozen there. They looked into each other’s eyes and scented each other like animals meeting again after an age.  _ Can I…? _ Kylo hadn’t wasted time putting hands on him. At Hux’s nod, Kylo’s palms were on his face. Kylo leaning in for the first hungry kiss in years.

“Look at me,” Kylo murmurs, bringing Hux up out of recollection. Hux surfaces as if from a pool, blinking in the warm sunlight.

“It won’t hurt,” Hux mutters to himself. How wrong that had been! He looks, sees Kylo’s questioning face. “Nothing, darling. Something from a long time ago.”

“I remember,” says Kylo. “The dance. I’ll always remember that night.”

The golden latch of Kylo’s eyes still only opens for Hux. Kylo looks at him as if he means to devour Hux, as if he could do so only by looking. Hux believes it. There is no one else in all the world. There are only these two. No one else matters. Hux wears a little metal cross on a length of cord around his neck, though the proportions of it are off. It almost looks like a tiny sword. Kylo made it from iron scrap at the shop. It has no value, to the casual observer. A simple cross made of cheap materials, resting over the heart of a country doctor. It serves Hux better than either of the wedding bands he’s worn. Hux looks into Kylo’s face, looks idly and lovingly without attempting to memorize it. He will never lose this man again. Death will have to pry them apart, and Hux will fight that too. He’s never been this happy in his whole life. This could be a dream, a good dream.

Is this a dream? Is this


End file.
